


Underneath the Tree

by SnitchesAndTalkers



Category: Fall Out Boy
Genre: Christmas Fluff, Fake/Pretend Relationship, Friends to Lovers, Interior Decorating, Kid Fic, M/M, Mutual Pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-01
Updated: 2020-12-24
Packaged: 2021-03-09 17:47:48
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 24
Words: 39,774
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27820246
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SnitchesAndTalkers/pseuds/SnitchesAndTalkers
Summary: When Patrick's producer asks him to film a series of live shows showing how to stage the perfect family Christmas, it could be a career coup. The studio wants to keep it authentic: Patrick's gorgeous house, Patrick's handsome husband, Patrick's adorable daughter.The problem is, Patrick's not married.
Relationships: Patrick Stump/Pete Wentz
Comments: 890
Kudos: 171





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Hello, and welcome to the advent calendar fic! Yes, 24 days, 24 chapters, we are seeing this baby through until Christmas! 
> 
> This fic is based very loosely on the holiday movie Christmas in Connecticut. I remember watching it when I was a kid in the 80s and then in the 90s, a remake was pulled together, directed by none other than Arnold Schwarzenegger. Yeah, the dude from Terminator, former senator of the great state of California, once directed an incredibly cheesy, slightly weird Christmas movie. You could check it out, if you wanted to, it won't spoil the fic since, honestly, aside from the basic premise, I've tossed out most of the plot. But if you do decide to watch it, please brace yourself for the bizarreness of Tony Curtis telling Kris Kristofferson-apropos of absolutely nothing-that Dyan Canon likes having her toes sucked. I swear to you, I am not making that up. 
> 
> Anyway... please, enjoy some holiday Peterick fake dating and I'll see you tomorrow!
> 
> Huge thank you to [the_chaotic_panda](https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_chaotic_panda/pseuds/the_chaotic_panda) and [OpenEndedDoor](https://archiveofourown.org/users/OpenEndedDoor/pseuds/OpenEndedDoor) for beta services and listening to me ramble endlessly about this fic. You guys are the best.

Like most of Patrick’s problems, this one’s not his fault. 

No one else does more for the  _ Where the Heart Is  _ brand than Patrick. No one else’s features on the minutiae of interior design are better researched. No one else has worked their fingers to actual lymph-and-pus blisters in the name of batten board panelling. His articles and videos feature on Pinterest boards across all occupied continents.  _ Ellen DeGeneres  _ retweeted his recipe for chicken cacciatore. Ellen! 

Patrick’s an excellent writer and an even better presenter, and he resents any implication to the contrary. He’s clawed his way to the top on hooked hands and single-minded tenacity. Not to brag, but Patrick’s  _ good _ at what he does. So what if most people find home design vapid—it’s artistic, creative, and he doesn’t remember asking anyone for an opinion. He’s  _ talented.  _ He deserves more than the Monday night graveyard slot on WtHITV and there’s no way he’s watching his career nosedive on the whims of handsome, despotic producers. Speaking of… 

Brendon, Patrick’s handsome, despotic producer, perches on the edge of Patrick’s desk. “Clear your diary next week.”

Patrick blinks. This could be a career-changing super event, or the seed of a sexual harassment case, it really could go either way. “Hi, Mr. Urie. How’s my favourite boss?”

Brendon takes a sip from his cardboard coffee cup. “You’re covering Ryan’s live stream. Five episodes, starting Monday. I emailed you the schedule.”

Brendon frightens Patrick the way a genetically modified T-rex frightens hapless food-goats: He’s never actually  _ watched  _ Brendon tear someone limb from limb, but the threat is implied. 

“Christmas?” Patrick says. “As in, Christmas  _ this _ year?”

Brendon nods. “Christmas. This year.”

To clarify, lifestyle entertainment exists in a time warp where features are written months before the event. Christmas articles were researched, filed and cleared in August. It’s December 15th. The mercury hasn’t cleared thirty in three weeks and local radio is playing Feliz Navidad on loop. Not a solitary lifestyle writer on either side of the equator is thinking about Christmas right now. Patrick just spent two hours researching Easter wreaths and beach-bod-ready smoothie diets. His desk is littered with springtime fabrics and rabbit-themed candy. He’s not emotionally equipped to deal with Christmas. 

“Oh,” Patrick says, shoving his glasses up his nose. He gathers up all his courage. Being real, this isn’t a  _ lot  _ of courage. It’s maybe 2.5 ounces of courage, but he gathers it, and says, “Um, is there a reason Ryan can’t do it?”

Brendon pulls a face like he just bit into bad sushi. “I’m not allowed to talk about it. HR held a meeting, total yawnfest.”

“Oh,” Patrick says, again.

“So, as the only married content creator with a passably attractive face, cute kid,  _ and  _ a slice of John Hughes real estate to your name, this one’s on you,” Brendon says, frowning at his phone. “Oh. We’re using your house, by the way.”

“We… won’t be using the studio?” Patrick asks. He’s not going to focus on  _ passably attractive.  _

“Not personal enough, apparently.” Brendon pulls a face, like the concept of human interaction is distasteful to him. “We considered a rental but… Do you have  _ any  _ idea how hard it is to hire colonial style mini mansions this close to Christmas? Very. It’s  _ very _ hard, Patrick.”

In the face of this wall of information, Patrick bites his lip and affects the fifth amendment. He thinks about the place where he lives. Specifically, he thinks about the unused oven, the white carpets, the furniture that’s both cutting-edge stylish and cut-your-shins sharp. Come to think of it, does he even  _ own  _ a Christmas tree? 

He takes a sip of his room temperature coffee, hums, and begins to sweat. “Oh,” he says. “That’s—Oh?”

“I’ve got clearance from Gerard,” Brendon says, smoothing his tie. “He thinks it’s a great idea.”

Gerard is Director of Creative Vision. Clearance from Gerard is like a journalistic cheat card for life.  _ I’ve got clearance from Gerard  _ opens doors, diaries, and budgets. Patrick’s panic, like his sweating, intensifies.

Patrick says, “Uhhh,” then he snatches up the half-eaten bagel from his desk and crams a bite the size of a baseball into his mouth to buy himself time to think. 

“You’re running segments on decor, party planning, holiday food,” Brendon goes on, toying with a cufflink. “Wreath making, cookie baking, cocktail shaking. Nothing a pro like you can’t handle. What do you think? Do you love it?”

Patrick attempts to mask how much he does not love it with a big, enthusiastic nod. Brendon manages to be both the unstoppable force and immovable object in all things WtHI. Motivator of talent, maker of household names, bullier of interns; Patrick couldn’t say no to him if his life depended on it. Which it  _ does _ in this situation. More than one person is going to kill him if he doesn’t apply the brakes. He rolls his chair a little further from Brendon and meets the cubicle wall with a thump. 

“You’re generating lots of interest online, the blog and such,” Brendon says, looming into Patrick’s personal space. “Well, you and that adorable family of yours. And do you know what hits generate? Advertising revenue. I don’t need to tell you how important ad revenue is to the brand, do I? Or what happens to presenters who  _ stop _ generating it?”

Brendon’s threat comes through loud and clear: he’s making a list, checking it twice, gonna find out who’s featured or iced. 

“No, sir,” Patrick breathes. “It sounds like a great idea. It’s just…”

Brendon’s eyebrow climbs. “You don’t sound stoked. I really put my ass on the line with this. It could open doors for you, you know. Today—a Christmas feature piece. Tomorrow—a regular weekend spot on the channel.”

Patrick hedges. God, but he  _ really  _ wants a weekend spot. 

“Well…” he says. “I should ask my husband first. We’d have to discuss Brontë appearing on TV, like, he’s pretty strict about showing her face in pictures, so—”

“Do you have to run everything by your husband?” Brendon says, looking at his manicure. He’s starting to sound bored. Patrick’s chances at that presenter spot sink faster than a badly made cheese soufflé. 

“No! It all sounds incredible,” says a voice that sounds just like Patrick’s, only stupider. “Pete and I are—We’re on board. You can count on us, Mr. Urie. We’ll see you Monday, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.” 

Brendon’s already scrolling through his phone, no doubt finding the next person to terrorise. “Excellent, dress the kid in something cute, and do  _ not _ fuck this up. And for fuck’s sake, get a wedding ring. Middle America’s ready for gay, but they won’t stand for unconventional.” 

And then he exits stage left in a cloud of Armani Pour Homme, leaving Patrick with a latent stomach ulcer and a tension knot the size of Pangaea. 

Patrick stares at his naked ring finger in fascinated horror and listens to the hum of his own churning blood in his ears. He’s made some mistakes at work, but nothing that could conceivably qualify as an international diplomatic event. Sticky with the kind of irrational panic he does not deserve, he does what he always does when things go south: He calls his best friend. 

“Hey, man. What’s up?” Pete greets him. 

Confession time; chicken cacciatore might not be the only thing Patrick’s lied about. (Misled! Or… Failed to correct! Assumptions were made! It’s not Patrick’s fault!) Patrick sighs, heartfelt. Why do terrible things happen to good people? 

“Fuck.” Patrick bangs his forehead against his desk three times. Distressingly, he’s still in the studio when he looks up. “Okay, don’t kill me, but I may have a problem, and you and Brontë are the only people in Chicago—no, the  _ world— _ who can fix it.”


	2. Chapter 2

Patrick’s life is a Michael Frayn play.

In less than 72 hours, he’s supposed to stand in front of a camera crew and show the world his husband, daughter, and rambling, colonial home in Wilmette. He has a couple of problems with this. 

Patrick’s not married to Pete. In fact, Patrick’s not married to anyone, and he’s got the string of meaningless Grindr hook-ups to prove it. Patrick doesn’t have a daughter, either. He doesn’t live in a house, he lives in a big, open-concept apartment on the Near North Side. He feels stupid, and probably unemployed, because that’s what he’s going to be in three days time when Brendon finds out the truth. Patrick is going to be in  _ so much _ trouble.

It’s not like he went out of his way to lie, it was just… circumstantial. He brought a picture to work, taken by Pete—staging a recipe, or a décor project, or  _ something— _ and in the corner of the shot was a pair of pudgy baby hands. Patrick didn’t notice, but Brendon did. Brendon was a junior producer and paid to notice  _ everything _ and, by extension, ruin Patrick’s life.

So, Brendon said, “Wait, you have a kid?” 

Patrick was going to say “Not that I know of” with a big ol’ Barney Stinson wink, but before he  _ could,  _ Brendon went on, “Hey, could you present a feature on nursery décor? I’ll credit you.”

And Patrick was a Research Associate which meant he didn’t get within sniffing distance of a credit and having a credit was the thing he wanted most in the world, so Patrick said, “Yes, she’s mine! Of course she’s mine! Her name is Brontë, isn’t she adorable? I’ll have the teleplay on your desk by close of play.” 

Like an  _ idiot. _

The feature was a huge success, Patrick got his credit and that was that. 

Except, that wasn’t  _ that,  _ was it? Like his Grindr hookups and most of eighth grade math, the lie ran away from him. Pete became Patrick’s handsome husband and the doting father to their beautiful baby girl for the purpose of Patrick’s continued employment. Patrick had to get pictures of Pete and Brontë to put on his desk. He had to stop flirting with guys at work, even the super cute ones and— _ ugh! _ Patrick cannot express the particular order of magnitude to which this has harmed his sex life. Order of shagnitude he’d call it, if he was allowed to have sex with the British guy in production, which he’s not, because everyone thinks he’s married to Pete.

Long story short? He doesn’t have a husband, or a daughter, or a gorgeous house in semi-rural Illinois. But Brendon  _ thinks  _ he has all those things, so what Patrick’s  _ got _ is a problem, and he needs a Christmas miracle of 34th St proportions to fix it.

Lucky for Patrick, Pete  _ does  _ live in the northern suburbs with his adorable, bouncy-haired pre-schooler in a big, sprawling slice of colonial-style suburbia. Patrick drives there after work, sliding through the twinkly depths of HOA territory in his impractical but gorgeous German sports car. There’s deep-dish pizza on the passenger seat and craft beer in the trunk. This is a study in advanced best friend bribery. 

Here are the facts, in no particular order: 

  1. Patrick lives at Pete’s place a solid 73-percent of the time. 
  2. Brontë has called him daddy on three separate occasions. 
  3. Pete’s been single since Brontë’s mom left him holding the (newborn) baby. Plus, Patrick’s longest and most fulfilling emotional relationship is with Pete, anyway. What’s a week of make-believe matrimonial harmony between bros?



Possibly, this might be traumatising for the three-year-old he plans to pass off as his own genetic progeny. Patrick’s agonised about that, he’s not a monster. But, he rationalises, he’s Brontë’s partner in Pete-defying crime, her honorary uncle, her  _ godfather.  _ Or, he would be her godfather if Pete had her baptised, but that’s semantics. The point is, Patrick heard her first word, saw her first steps, and fell asleep in the nursing chair with her sprawled on his chest. 

Whichever way you look at it, he’s a couple of strands of DNA from actual, honest to God parenthood. Patrick loves that little girl, truthfully. He loves her like she’s his own flesh and blood, so what’s the harm in claiming she is? They’ll just… play pretend for a couple of days, until the live streams are done and Christmas is over. Then Pete can go back to family life and Patrick can go back to fucking the anonymous twunks he picks up on dating apps. This won’t cause long-lasting psychological damage to any of them. It’ll be  _ fine.  _

The houses get taller the closer he gets to the lake, BMWs and Audis replacing Hondas and Fords on the driveways. Patrick could list the design features in his sleep: original hardwood floors, cornicing, paneling, Victorian fireplaces, hundreds of thousands of dollars spent in painstaking restoration projects. Pete lives in the nicest subdivision on the fanciest street in a Miss Havisham's wedding cake of a house he inherited from his grandma. The windows glow with cheer, shabby and cosy and more like home than anywhere Patrick’s lived since he moved out of his mom’s place ten years ago. 

Patrick pulls into the driveway and sits for a minute, the engine cooling with a soft tick, watching the shadows move behind the curtains. If there’s a weird knock in his chest, well, that’s between him and his next company-mandated medical.

Eventually, he gets too cold to sit outside in the car and makes his way inside without knocking.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey! Happy December 3rd! Hope you’re all having a great day so far!

“Just me,” Patrick calls out, setting pizza on the kitchen island and beer in the fridge and rummaging in the cabinet for plates. “I come bearing gifts: cheese, carbs, and facon—get it while it’s lukewarm!”

“Sticky!”

Brontë bursts into the kitchen first, a tiny dervish of sticky hands and dark curls, arms stretched for a full-body hug. She calls him Sticky with a thick, preschooler lisp, because when she was small, she couldn’t figure out  _ Patrick.  _ Now she’s bigger she pretends she still can’t and Patrick pretends to mind but doesn’t really. Patrick meets her halfway and swings her up into the air, giggling like a lunatic, and rests her on his hip where she can smother him in kisses. He smooths her curls and smells her baby shampoo and feels his heart fill up with intense,  _ bottomless  _ love. 

“I missed you,” she tells him, looking very sincere about it.

“Missed you too, beautiful girl,” he greets her. Then, because he doesn’t want her to grow up with skewed perceptions of womanhood and femininity, he adds, “Future rocket scientist, ender of world hunger, most-lauded president of these United States. Brontë Wentz, you’re getting so  _ big. _ How old are you now? Sixteen? Twenty-seven? Forty-two? What’re you benching these days? How’s your 401k?”

“Silly Sticky,” she laughs, holding up two tiny fingers and a tinier thumb, “‘m  _ this _ many only.” 

“Ancient,” he tells her. “Hey, have you heard of cocoa bombs? Put them in a mug,add warm milk and it turns into hot chocolate. Best of all, there’s  _ marshmallows  _ inside. Did you know that?”

“Yes,” says Brontë seriously, showing off Pete’s big, white teeth in Pete’s big, wide mouth. “No. I want one. I want—I want  _ five!” _

“Two,” Patrick counters.

“Ten thousand bazillion,” says Brontë , both driving a hard bargain, and not exactly clear on the linear progression of numbers. 

“I’ll bring you _three,_ one for every year old you are,” Patrick promises.

Brontë looks delighted and Pete follows her into the kitchen, looking exhausted. Pete’s a lawyer at his dad’s firm, working in finance or contract or something like that. It changes a lot and Pete seems unhappier with every department shakeup. Patrick worries, but never says it out loud. It’s not like Pete’s got many employment options with a kid to raise and a crumbling hundred-year-old property to renovate.

“Stop bribing my kid with candy,” Pete grumbles, with no heat behind it. 

“Ignore daddy. It’s only a bribe if I want something in return, he must’ve skipped that day at law school,” Patrick tells Brontë . To Pete, Patrick says, “Hey, gorgeous. Did you eat already? I brought pizza—it’s your favourite—and there’s Sam Adams in the fridge. Wow, did you do something with your hair? A new product, maybe?”

“It’s kid spit,” Pete says, bopping Brontë on the nose on his way to the fridge. He touches his temple and frowns. “Maybe kid boogers. The details are hazy.”

“Looks  _ great,”  _ Patrick schmoozes. “Have you been working out? And is that a new cologne?” 

“Stop,” Pete says. Patrick stops and gives Pete a big, happy smile. Pete pretends to scowl and pops the cap on a beer. “You can stop smiling at me like that, and stop being cute. I know you’re trying to butter me up.”

“Um,  _ what?” _ Patrick looks at Brontë, appalled. Brontë giggles and buries her face in his neck. “Do you hear this, sweetheart? I have no idea what your daddy’s talking about. This is slander.”

“Daddy’s a samalander!” Brontë shrieks. 

“Salamander,” Pete corrects absently. “And that’s not the same as slander. Slander is telling big mean lies about someone else. So, if I say grandma bakes horrible cookies, that’s slander. But if I say Sticky’s an idiot, that’s just cold, hard facts. Can you say idiot, sweetie?”

“Idiot,” Brontë repeats, shoving her finger up Patrick’s nose. 

“Harsh,” Patrick says, pulling it back out. “Also, this Sticky thing? Gotta stop, kiddo. Smokin’ hot babes don’t date guys named Sticky.”

Pete mutters something into his beer. Something that sounds like, “You wouldn’t know what to do with a smokin’ hot babe if she came with a full set of written instructions and a map.”

Brontë wriggles down to the ground and scampers back into the living room to watch cartoons or scribble on the walls in marker. Patrick looks at an insignificant spot on the kitchen wall, just past Pete’s head and says, “Are you really mad at me? Or is this, like, that fake mad you do sometimes, just to let me know you’re the one in charge?”

Pete takes a swallow of his beer and looks at Patrick, right in the eyes. 

“I haven’t decided yet.” His mouth gives a particularly attractive twist on the last syllable. Pete takes a seat at the island and makes a big, unnecessary show of giving Patrick all his attention. “Persuade me. Present your counsel. Convince me, in ten sentences or less, that this is a fucking fantastic idea, and not an unmitigated disaster waiting to happen.”

What Patrick’s not hearing is a firm and definite ‘no’. This bodes well for him. 

“Okay, first off, you would be doing me the  _ biggest _ favour,” Patrick begins.

“One sentence down. I remain unconvinced.”

“It’s never too early to get a child involved in a profession,” Patrick continues. “Brontë’s the perfect age to develop an eye for journalism and-slash-or interior design and then she can earn enough money to buy a BMW, like me, instead of a shitty Ford, like you.”

Pete covers his eyes with both hands. “The insults! They do nothing!”

“Look,” says Patrick. “It’s one week of your life—”

“For a single parent, in the run-up to the biggest child-centric holiday of the year,” Pete finishes. He has a point. Patrick doesn’t  _ like _ it, but he does. “Couldn’t you, like, post an ad on craigslist or something? You’re cute. I’m pretty sure we could find you someone by Monday if we tried hard enough. How about one of those weirdos you keep picking up off of Grindr?”

“They’re not... weirdos,” Patrick says. He says it without a lot of force. Sometimes they’re weirdos. It’s hard to tell when he’s scrolling, though. When he’s scrolling they look fine. Nice, even. The ability to take a decent dick pic does not equal a full personality test.

Pete leans back and folds his arms in a way that’s distracting, lawyerish, and kind of maybe a tiny bit sexy. “Why do  _ I  _ have to help, anyway?”

Any good feeling melts like a hot cocoa snowball. Patrick can’t believe the bullshit he’s hearing. 

“Why do you…? You realise that this is  _ all your fault,  _ right? If you’d stopped me three years ago, like a  _ good _ friend, instead of being all  _ Sure, Patrick, take some pictures to work, whatever gets you a credit _ —”

“Objection!” Pete barks. “I’m not responsible for your wild and vacillating untruths.”

“Overruled,” Patrick parries. His practical courtroom experience is limited, but he’s watched every episode of Suits, so he’s confident he knows how these things work. “The witness is unreliable. I have  _ written testimony _ that he agreed—”

Pete rolls his eyes. “Yeah, no. I didn’t say no, and that’s not the same thing. This is  _ your  _ hole—start climbing, asshole.”

Patrick sighs with as much drama as he can muster and looks at Pete sadly. “Please? I’ll steal freebies from the supply store at work. Would you like a new couch? Because I can get you a new couch.” 

Pete helps himself to the first slice of pizza from the box and forces Patrick to watch in agonised silence as he chews and swallows. 

“A couch?”

“Totally. Two couches! Anything you want.” 

“Joke’s on you,” Pete says. “I’d have agreed for a lamp table.”

“Are you serious? You mean...?” Patrick’s breath leaves his lungs in a long, snaky hiss.

“Yes, I’ll be your fake husband,” Pete says, rolling his eyes. 

“Really?” Patrick could kiss him on the mouth, but he’ll save that for when they have an audience. “Oh my God. You’re the  _ best.” _

“I know, I know.” Pete waves at Patrick, an irritated shooing motion that feels frankly undeserved. “We’re the obvious choice; Wentzes are genetically predisposed to look great on camera. Just—Promise you won’t do anything stupid, like falling in love with me.”

“Ew!” Patrick laughs with a note of creeping hysteria, reduced to speaking in exclamations of increasing shrillness. “Gross! As if!”

What’s that phrase about famous last words?


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Day 4! It’s day 4, people! Hope December 4th is going well for you, darlings!

Spin for You is, without question, the best place in Chicago for pre-owned music. It’s also owned, staffed and managed by Joseph Trohman: Patrick’s best not-Pete friend, noted fun sponge and certified party pooper. 

“I want the record to show that I think this is a very bad idea,” Joe says, brushing past Patrick with a crate of assorted cassette tapes. 

Patrick follows him through R&B, soul, and into grunge. 

“You say that about all my ideas,” he calls at Joe’s back, “even the really good ones. Like… remember spring break, junior year?” 

“Also a bad idea,” Joe points out. “Is this about claiming fake-conjugal rights? Are times that hard?”

“I’m capable of finding men to have sex with,” Patrick says. “That area of my life is fine. I don’t need a fake marriage to get dick.”

They’ve caught the attention of a sniffy-looking bougie in thrift vintage. Scowling, she clears her throat and tosses half her stack of suburban dad rock onto a random shelf. Good—Patrick just saved her husband the effort of pretending to look pleased when he unwraps (What’s the Story) Morning Glory on Christmas morning. You’re welcome,  _ Brad. _

“If you say so.” Joe swings by the cash register without breaking stride. “Can I help you, ma’am?”

“These,” she says, slapping down vinyl and jewel cases. “Wrap them.” 

“We don’t gift wrap,” Joe says. “Sorry,” he adds, ever so sweetly. 

“You gift-wrapped for the guy you served five minutes ago,” she says. “I saw you.”

“Oh.” Joe tips his head to one side and Patrick feels a tiny fount of glee spring forth in his chest. “Yeah. Fresh out of gift wrap. Used it on that guy.”

“I can literally  _ see _ the gift wrap behind the counter.”

“What? That? Yeah, no. That’s  _ my  _ gift wrap. Personal use, you know?”

“Refusing to gift wrap  _ and _ a side of vulgarity from your staff? How charming,” she counters, glaring from Joe to Patrick. Like homophobia and disapproval will turn them into the holly-est, jolly-est record store clerks in town. “No one needs to hear about men doing…  _ that,  _ out in public. I’m not against people… like you. I just don’t need it shoved down my throat.”

Annoyed, Patrick speaks before he thinks. “Oh,” he says, shaking his head, “I don’t work here. No, I just come here to blow him in the back room now and again. I totally  _ do  _ need it shoved down my throat, but not in public. So we’re cool, right?”

“Ugh,” she says, shoving the stack at Joe. “I’ll stick to Borders, thanks. I want you to know that I’ll be leaving a  _ very _ honest review on Yelp. Merry Christmas.”

“Happy Hanukkah!” Joe calls after her. He turns back to Patrick. “I like paying rent,” he says. “I like not being homeless.”

“She’s an asshole, don’t worry about her,” Patrick says. “Worry about me and my plan.”

“Your plan to play mommy and daddy with Pete? Your terrible, awful plan? The plan that’s going to land you in therapy? That plan?”

Patrick pouts. “Why are you so against the plan?”

“Patrick…” Joe sighs. “I’m barely over the last time, don’t make me do it again.”

Patrick rolls his eyes. “Dude. I haven’t had a thing for Pete since sophomore year. Come on.”

“Lying to yourself? That shall be your undoing,” Joe says, in the tones of Clancey Brown’s Kurgan. To the college-age kid placing down a copy of Rain Dogs on the counter, he says, “Can I gift wrap that for you?”

“Good choice,” Patrick tells her, with a huge grin.

“Thanks,” she says, smiling back. “And you  _ totally _ have a thing for Pete, by the way. I don’t know you, but I ship it.”

“Assholes,” Patrick mutters. 

While Joe deals with the line, Patrick stands to one side. His whole body feels tingly, his surroundings surreal, like he’s moving in slow motion while the rest of the world is speeding up. One thing he knows beyond all rational doubt is that Joe is wrong. The crush on Pete is dead and gone. Dead. and. gone. God, he came here for a believability rating re: the plausibility of his fake marriage. He didn’t ask to be  _ judged. _

Also: What if  _ Pete _ thinks Patrick has a thing for him? That this is an ongoing quest to sneak into his home, heart, and underwear? What if he’s spent the past ten years seeing Patrick less as a friend and more as a community project? What if—root beer popsicle of damnable horror—Pete thinks Patrick is one of those  _ predatory gays _ the media warns everyone about? Patrick’s stomach turns over. Panic! Panic on the streets of Wicker Park!

By the time Joe’s done, Patrick’s a mess. 

“Are we a believable couple, or not?” he demands, aiming for cool but hitting shrill. “If you were the target demographic for WtHITV, would you buy it?”

Joe takes Patrick by both shoulders and looks straight into his eyes. “Yes, I think it’ll be believable. I find the two of you a  _ very  _ believable couple. Just make sure you remember the difference between real love and the love on TV, ‘kay?”

“I’m not  _ in love _ with Pete,” Patrick insists. 

Joe’s expression is unreadable, his voice moreso. “We’ll see.”

Patrick doesn’t push him for details. 


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> T'was the night before the Where the Heart Is Christmas Special...

And that’s how Patrick finds himself in Pete’s living room, discussing the details of their marriage. It’s barely 12 hours until their scheduled premiere as Mr. and Mr. Stump-Wentz. Patrick is, possibly, panicking.

Pete’s dressed in Mickey Mouse PJ pants and the Certified Hot Dad t-shirt Patrick bought him when Brontë was born.  _ As a joke, _ by the way, Patrick’s never given a single thought to the scoville factor of Pete in his life. The pants are soft and worn and cling in all the places a good friend wouldn’t look, and there’s a tiny gap between the waistband and shirt. Pete’s exposing a lot of warm brown tummy skin, his cock less  _ suggestion _ and more  _ pornographic representation. _ Staring is creepy, so Patrick takes a sip of his drink every time his eyes stray. He is very aware of his blood pressure rising in correlation to his glass emptying. He takes a deep breath. He exhales  _ slowly. _

They’re sprawled on the big leather couch Patrick liberated from the design room. At some point, Pete’s head ended up in Patrick’s lap and Patrick didn’t have the heart to move it. There’s a bottle of whisky on the coffee table, a third empty. The whisky is the only good choice Patrick has made in the past three days, definitely. Possibly three years. It’s only through the numbing properties of grain alcohol that Patrick can think about their scheme without panicking. He’s going to write a thank you letter to Mr. Glenmorangie. He’s going to post it on his blog. He’s going to make sure that everyone in America knows that whisky—like,  _ this  _ whisky—is the perfect emotional anaesthesia. He’s going to do all those things when he regains his gross motor skills.

“Okay,” Patrick slurs. Before he can overthink things— _ more, _ before he can overthink things  _ more _ —he takes a big, numbing gulp from his glass. “Start at the beginning. Let’s make sure we’re absolutely clear on this.”

“So, we started dating in college,” Pete says, rubbing his stomach, fingers tucking just so under the waist of his pants.

Patrick shakes his head, as if to dislodge the bad thoughts, Etch a Sketch-style. “We _met_ in college, but we didn’t _hook up_ til after graduation. You were a gentleman. You said you didn’t want to defile me until I reached the age of majority.” 

“Oh, we’re pretending you were a virgin in college?” Pete says, eyes sparkling. “Because I remember the Taco Bell bathroom incident, even if you pretend you don’t.”

“If I don’t remember his name, it doesn’t count,” Patrick bleats, feeling squicky. He has no idea why discussing his previous sexual conquests is starting to make him feel weird. It’s probably the whisky—God knows, he has drunk so much whisky. A coping mechanism, probably. For, um, a problem he does not have.

“Okay,” Pete says, snuggling further into Patrick’s lap, his nose inches from Patrick’s zipper. It's like he thinks Patrick’s some kind of anthropomorphised Ken doll. Like he doesn’t appreciate that Patrick has a fully functioning penis in his jeans. A penis that reacts to external stimulus in a purely biological way that has nothing at all to do with the proximity of Pete’s stupid mouth. 

Lucky Patrick’s skilled at faking indifference. Lucky he knows to bite the groan off and shove Pete’s head away with an irritated, “Fuck off, asshole”. Lucky Pete’s oblivious, or Patrick might find himself in a real fucking situation here. 

“Okay,” Pete says again, blinking up from Patrick’s thighs, “but what if we didn’t hook up until after Brontë was born?”

“Explain,” Patrick says. When he cocks his head, his glasses slide down his nose.

“What if I knocked someone up, and it didn’t work out—” 

Patrick clutches at his chest and sloshes most of his whisky over Pete’s head. “The scandal!”

“Asshole,” Pete splutters, mopping his face with his shirt. “But, what if you calmed me down and helped me get ready for the baby.”

“Fuck, imagine that. Me. Helping you. With your baby.” 

“I know you helped,” Pete says quietly. “You helped a lot.”

Understatement of the century. Patrick built so many pieces of flat-pack nursery furniture he bore hex key-shaped indents on his fingers. He read baby development blogs, filled in the milestone book, laundered tiny, reusable diapers. Pete smiles at Patrick, right at him, and Patrick melts a little bit. When Pete smiles at him like that, lit up from within, Patrick doesn’t even have the heart to call him a rude name. 

“Like you could’ve coped without me,” he mutters gruffly. More whisky. He needs so much more whisky.

“Dude, I still can’t cope without you,” Pete says, squeezing Patrick’s hand. Patrick tries to ignore the irregular thump to his heart. “But why don’t we just… embellish the truth, you know? You moved in when Brontë was a newborn. We got closer and closer.”

“Spit up is a well-known aphrodisiac,” Patrick says. 

Pete ignores him. “I wanted to kiss you, but I never quite plucked up the courage because you were… You were so much. So, I bottled it up inside, and I didn’t say a word, and I watched you go out with other guys and I stayed at home with B, and I thought... I thought, God, I should tell him, I should tell him how I feel.”

A loaded pause.

“And how did you feel? You know, hypothetically. In this hypothetical world where we fell in love,” Patrick asks, a little breathless. Breathlessness is a known side-effect of expensive single malt. Look it up. Wikipedia totally has his back on this one.

“Hypothetically, I was painfully in love with you,” Pete says, zeroing in on the one thing Patrick’s heart can’t bear to hear right now. Does this feel a little too real? Is it just Patrick, or have Pete’s acting skills improved, like, a lot since they were in college? 

“Oh,” Patrick says. His hand in Pete’s hair goes still. His heart is pounding and he has no idea why. This is  _ Pete, _ his platonic soulmate, one heart split and placed in two bodies like a living fucking friendship charm. Patrick doesn’t have a thing for Pete. Patrick is  _ over _ this. 

“And I kept it inside, didn’t say a word to you. I kept doing what I had to do to make it through each day with a newborn and a job. But, God, Patrick, I wanted. I wanted you so much, and I started to think that maybe you wanted me too. I’d catch you looking at me when you thought I wasn’t paying attention, with this, this look on your face.”

“I have never looked a look in my fucking life,” Patrick objects, his face scrunching into a scowl. 

Pete laughs. “I wanted to kiss you, and I was pretty sure you wanted to kiss me, too. And then, one night, after we’d put B down to sleep…”

Patrick can’t say a word. He can’t move, or breathe, or blink. Patrick doesn’t want to think about Pete kissing him when Brontë was tiny and they were both exhausted, but now, all he can think about Pete kissing him when Brontë was tiny and they were both exhausted. And he does. He imagines it—that agony of truth. That wonderful moment when they collapsed on the couch together, and Pete did it, Pete kissed him. God, but Patrick’s stupid heart is not supposed to  _ want  _ this fiercely. 

When Patrick speaks, his voice is rough, low. “Yeah? Then what?”

Pete snorts. “Then our eyes met over a stack of bottles and I ravished you over the diaper pail. The rest is history, lunchbox.”

The spell breaks. Pete sticks his tongue out and waggles his eyebrows. Patrick hits him in the face with a throw pillow and considers holding it in place, depriving Pete of air until he kicks his last kick. Or Patrick’s face stops feeling like it’s on fire. Whichever comes first.

“Stay over?” Pete says, when they’ve stopped laughing. Patrick rubs his jaw and looks at the clock over the fireplace.

Practically, it makes sense. In a few hours Brendon and the production crew will arrive and Patrick will stand in front of a camera and tell the world that Pete is his husband. (They should warn his mother. They should warn  _ Pete’s _ mother. It’s on the list.) On the other hand, Patrick is very confused. A sensible man would call an Uber, would go home and sober up and get a handle on his complicated thoughts and feelings. 

“Might as well,” Patrick agrees with a shrug. If he was sensible, he reasons, he wouldn’t be in this position in the first place. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just a little note to say thank you so much for reading along and I hope your holiday season is shaping up to be a good one!


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all so much for being so awesome, I'm having so much fun sharing this with you guys!

And that’s how Patrick finds himself, drunk and dressed in Batman PJs, saying goodnight to Pete in the hallway between the master suite and the guest room. 

Pete’s not wearing a shirt. Patrick’s trying hard not to stare, so Pete won’t think he’s a perv. Or, God, maybe he  _ wants  _ Pete to think he’s a perv. Maybe Patrick’s hoping Pete’s a perv, too. Pete’s gaze seems hooked on Patrick’s mouth, a mack-seeking missile. For the first time since they met, Patrick doesn’t know what Pete’s thinking. 

Pete’s bedroom door is ajar. Patrick can make out the shadowy suggestion of the bureau, the closet, the framed prints on the wall above—above—

The bed. 

Patrick’s whole respiratory system stills. Patrick read somewhere that the universe never stopped expanding, that it grows out and out, duplicating, growing,  _ reaching.  _ He read that one day, it will start to shrink. Gravity will collapse in on itself and everything will draw back to the same single point of ignition. He thinks that might be happening now. He thinks Pete’s bed may be the centre of the universe. 

It’s fine. It’s just the way Pete’s looking at him, the way he spoke with such deep and enduring sincerity when he talked about falling in love with Patrick.  It’s been years since Patrick had a crush on Pete. It was stupid shit, totally high school. Patrick’s grown up. He’s  _ learnt _ from the experience.

He learnt that Pete kissed everyone on the neck sooner or later, that tactile was not a synonym for romantic feeling, that Pete shared beds and bodily fluids like regular people shared CDs. Want to scrape the gloss of debonair sophistication from your older guy crush? Try watching him jump off a roof with nothing but a patio umbrella. There are only so many midnight drives to the ER you can take before you start to suspect the subject of your long-enduring affection might be sort of a moron. 

“So,” Pete says. He takes a step toward Patrick, then stops, just short. It’s like they’re separated by a circle of salt and Patrick can’t work out which of them is the demon. Only the faintest suggestion of Pete’s body heat brushes Patrick’s skin. 

Patrick wants to say something witty and smooth. Something that gets him out of his mind and gets Pete out of his Mickey Mouse pants. Either Patrick hasn’t felt this way about Pete in years, or he’s become so used to lying to himself he can no longer tell the difference. This is unprecedented, unwelcome, Joe is going to be  _ so fucking smug.  _

“So,” Pete says, again. “Looking forward to married life and, uh, all that comes with it?” 

Patrick opens his mouth, and a horror show falls out. “With  _ you? _ Yeah, you fucking wish, asshole.” 

It bubbles out of his throat like hot oil down a balustrade; sticky, without recall, with intent to wound. It oozes between them, ugly and unkind. They both make indecipherable sounds: Patrick’s distress, Pete’s… hurt? Annoyance? Patrick has no idea. He didn’t  _ mean  _ it. He wants to take it back immediately, to fall to his knees and gather the words back up like shards of glass. 

Pete steps back so fast and so hard he almost falls over, bumping into the door frame with his hip. His smile shifts from inviting to rictus, two bright spots of colour blooming high on his cheeks. 

“I didn’t mean…” Patrick starts, but it’s too late. He takes a step toward Pete, toward the  _ bed, _ but Pete takes a big step back. They repel like forces of nature, pushing Pete all the way back over the threshold and into his room. 

“Pete, I—” Patrick tries, miserable. But there’s nothing left to say. 

Patrick’s always known exactly what to say to Pete, so, why do the words run away from him now? He stands in front of Pete, tender with need, and for the first time in their ten years of friendship, he doesn’t know what to say. 

Pete shrugs and smiles, the hallway light catching the shine of his teeth. “It’s cool,” he says, his voice low and unreadable. “It’s just a game, isn’t it? It’s just pretend.”

_ It’s not a game, _ Patrick thinks desperately, his tongue gummed to the roof of this mouth. 

“Thank you,” he says, instead, “for, you know, for playing along. With my stupid game.” Why? Why is his mouth still making these horrible sounds?

Pete nods. “I’ll never say no to  _ you, _ Patrick,” he says, his voice a low rumble that does funny things to Patrick’s insides. “You know that, right?”

That sounds a lot like an invitation. Patrick’s needing heart hammers wildly. He examines Pete’s face with urgency, searches for something—anything—some infinitesimal sign that Pete wants to take him by the hand and guide him to the unmade bed. Pete rocks from foot to foot, lashes fanned over his cheeks, his thick lower lip between his teeth. It’s impossible to tell if he’s blushing. 

Patrick takes a deep breath. “I—”

“Goodnight, lunchbox.”

Pete slips through the door and pulls it closed behind him. Patrick stands in the hallway, alone. He makes a noise of intense irritation and self-loathing and turns away. He crosses the hallway and turns off the light and slips into his own dark, lonely bedroom. 

He lies in bed and scrolls through Grindr. Not because he wants to, but because it makes him feel numb.  Every slick, oiled body he sees either reminds him of Pete or doesn’t, which means he’s thinking about Pete, and he feels... confused. Bewildered. Like a fundamental part of who he is is missing, without knowing where to look for it.

He can’t decide if he’s comparing them to Pete because he wants them to be the same, or because he doesn’t. He falls asleep trying to figure it out. He does not dream.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well... I mean. We *almost* made progress?


	7. Chapter 7

T-minus five minutes to his preposterous televised debut as Pete’s fake husband and Patrick’s having some doubts.

A lot of doubts actually. Right now, Patrick has tenure in Serious Reservations and Well-Placed Misgivings. He’s spent every waking moment of the past 24 hours in an advanced and sweaty state of agonised doubt. Those waking moments? Like, basically _all_ of them. Patrick hasn’t slept because he laid awake, staring at the ceiling of Pete’s guest room, _doubting_ himself. 

For what it’s worth, Pete doesn’t look like he’s ever doubted a single doubt in his life. He loiters in black jeans, black shirt, a soft black scarf draped around his neck. He’s impossibly,  _ impossibly  _ good-looking, like the lead in a gay punk rock Hallmark movie. It turns out, it wasn’t a drunken misconception: Pete is eminently fuckable. 

God, Patrick’s had  _ years  _ to deal with this. Why is it only occurring to him  _ now _ that Pete’s  _ still  _ extremely hot? In theory anyway, because there’s no way anyone’s examining the specifics of  _ that _ revelation with the production crew’s tyres crunching in the driveway. Patrick cringes. Never has a boy made him feel so un-Patrick-like. Never has he felt so bumbling. He thinks of the stupid expression “weak in the knees,” how he always thought of it as gooey romantic nonsense, but now he has scientific proof that it’s a real physical condition. He hates himself for being such a cliché, for having such a crush, for being such a loser about it. 

And he  _ is _ a loser, isn’t he? He’s the loser who opened his mouth and lied to his boss and now he has to produce a believable tableau of family life until Christmas. He tugs at the sleeve of his shirt, adjusts the lapels of his blazer, and wonders, if he clicks the heels of his brogues together three times, will he wake up in his own bed, safe from his ridiculous, untruth-spilling tongue?

“Stupid,” Patrick hisses at his reflection in the warped antique mirror that Pete inherited, along with the house and the mothy furniture, when his grandma died four years ago. The blurry edges of Mirror-Patrick scowl back. 

Pete looks up from fixing Brontë’s hair, a barrette between his teeth. “Wha’?” he asks. Patrick shrugs. “‘o, ‘ot’s ‘u’id?”

“This,” Patrick says, gesturing. He means to include the house, the two of them, the idea that Patrick, certified Big Gay Disaster, might actually have a husband like Pete and a sweet little kid like Brontë. Instead, he only seems to point to himself. He runs with it. “I look ridiculous. A blazer? In my own home? Don we now our  _ gay  _ apparel.”

Pete spits out the barrette and looks at Patrick with a wolf’s grin. 

“You look good in  _ everything,  _ sweetie,” he says. 

He’s been saying things like that a lot this morning. Always in the same syrupy,  _ annoying  _ voice, coupled with such outrageous levels of eyebrow waggle that everyone in a tri-county radius will know he’s faking. It’s hard to shut it down when Pete responds to all overtures with Redoubled Attempts at Spousal Dialogue. According to Pete, Brendon’s going to eat it up with a spoon, a fiction Patrick longs to refute. What he wouldn’t give to be able to respond to “Pattycake, apple of my eye, hearth that warms the cold and lonely nights of my endless winter” with “Fuck off, asshole _.” _

Too bad he needs Pete on-side for the next five days. 

“Listen,” Patrick says. “I think we should...” 

Patrick’s got big plans for the rest of that sentence. He’s finishing strong on something like, _tone it down a little_ or _find me another fake husband, like, maybe Joe, or the pizza guy, or your dad_. Before he can speak, Pete slips an arm around his waist from behind and pulls Patrick into his chest. Patrick, struck with the sudden but visceral image of Pete doing the same thing, _only they’re_ _naked,_ squawks and jumps away, terrified. 

Pete’s brow draws low. “Uh,” he says, “are you okay?”

“I have to go,” Patrick begins, heart hammering so wildly he feels it in his throat, his wrists, the poorly-behaved organ just behind his zipper. “Make a call,” he clarifies, so Pete doesn’t think he’s running away, so Pete doesn’t tell Brendon the whole sorry tale, so Patrick still has a job when he gets back. He pastes on his biggest, sunniest smile. “I’ll be right back.”

“Wait,” Pete says, catching Patrick by the sleeve. Patrick turns but doesn’t meet Pete’s eyes. “Listen, is something wrong?”

Patrick looks at Pete like he’s certifiable. “Yes. Obviously.”

“I meant, like, beyond the whole we’re-about-to-lie-to-the-nation-about-a-marriage-that-does-not-exist… um…  _ thing?” _

“Wha’s’a’matter, Sticky?” Brontë asks, wrapping her arms around his leg. Patrick picks her up without thinking and rests her on his hip. The window of opportunity for his daring escape begins to close, slams shut, seals from the outside. 

“Nothing at all, sweetie,” Patrick says to Brontë . To Pete he says, “This is a bad idea. Horrible, in fact. I’m going to tell Brendon. I’m going to explain everything, and he’s going to fire me, but that’s okay. That’s fine. I think I can start over in Mexico. Or maybe Alaska—Do you think I’d make a better logger, or a crab fisherman?” 

“Honestly? Neither,” Pete says, looking at Patrick doubtfully. “You’re not qualified to log logs. You’re not qualified to wear the flannel shirt that would qualify you to log logs.”

“Big gay disaster,” Patrick tells Brontë sadly, Brontë giggles and honks his nose.

“It’s just a couple days,” Pete soothes. “We’ve got your back, don’t we, B? We love Sticky and we want him to be happy.”

“Love you, Sticky,” Brontë lisps, smacking a kiss to his cheek. Patrick’s heart melts, and a little of his uncertainty along with it.

“See?” Pete says, beaming. “Everything’s going to be fine.”

Before Patrick can argue the untruth of  _ that, _ Pete fumbles in the pocket of his jeans and pulls out a wedding ring. Patrick’s anxiety rockets to a decent 6 on the INES. 

“Patrick Stump,” Pete says, holding out the band of thick, buttery gold, “do you take this man to be your unlawfully not-wedded husband? To have and to hold, in sickness and in health, etc, etc, as long as we both shall live. Or, like, until Friday, whichever comes first.”

“That’s a nice ring,” Patrick says, narrowing his eyes. 

“It was my grandpa’s, I found it in the attic,” Pete says. “Stop looking at me like you’re interrogating me for state secrets and put the damn thing on your finger.”

Carefully, and without thinking about it at all, he plucks the ring from Pete’s hand and slides it onto his finger. He takes whatever feelings he may or may not have about this action and locks them right the fuck in a mental vault, under armed guard. “God, I’m not cut out for a life of deception. Do they teach you this in law school?”

“Absolutely,” Pete says, waving his hand so his wedding ring catches the weak winter sunlight. “I took all the major electives. Litigation, moot, legal writing, notional wedlock. Trust me, lunchbox, I’m a lawyer.”

Patrick’s about to tell Pete he wouldn’t trust him as far as he could throw him and he’s got a  _ lousy _ arm, but the doorbell rings. He feels his face drain through several Farrow and Ball colour charts of grey. He grips Pete’s hand, and keeps Brontë on his hip, and says, shakily, “Oh my fucking God.”

“Sticky sayed a  _ bad _ word,” Brontë says, mouth twisted into the same disapproving moue as her dad’s. 

“He did,” Pete says, towing them both toward the door. “Sticky is a bad person, honey. Don’t be like Sticky.”

Patrick opens the door and there’s a camera crew, and production staff and Brendon, severe and unsmiling in a thousand dollar suit, his suede boots covered in grey slush. 

“I  _ hate _ the fucking countryside,” Brendon greets him. 

“Hey,” Patrick says, “welcome to, uh. My house, I guess.”

“Why do you look like a travel agent?” says Brendon, tilting down his sunglasses and looking at the two of them over the frames. “Cute kid, by the way. Okay, I need you in wardrobe ASAP, I’m thinking Neil Patrick Harris, I’m thinking Portland Gay, I’m thinking dad chic, but sexy. Let’s move, people, we’re burning day— _ Pete Wentz?” _

Next to Patrick, Pete has gone stone-still. “Uh… Brendon. Hi.” He regains motor control in a panicky, grey-faced rush, groping for Patrick’s hand and gripping it like a vice. “What a… lovely surprise.”

“You never mentioned a husband,” Brendon says coolly. 

“Um,” Patrick says. “Do you two know each other?”

Words do not express how much Patrick wants Brendon to say no.

“It’s… complicated,” Pete says. Every part of his face is grey, except for the parts that are green.

“Yes, we do,” Brendon says, showing teeth. To Pete, he says, “You look… different. Without the suit.”

“Um?” Patrick says, blood pressure climbing.

Pete’s cheeks are the colour of well-thumbed putty. He opens his mouth to speak and Patrick anticipates the horrifying things he could say next. Things like “Is this what they call love at first sight?” or “Brendon is one of my many boyfriends who are not you”. Ugh, if they’re sleeping together, Patrick is shipping himself to the  _ moon. _

“Pete is my lawyer,” Brendon says, sagging against the doorframe. Then he says the one thing Patrick is not prepared for: “He’s handling my divorce.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> What? You thought Patrick would be the only one with a career on the line?


	8. Chapter 8

Everyone shuffles inside. Patrick dumps Brontë on a production assistant and drags Pete to the pantry for a quiet but necessary argument. He didn’t imagine the first fight of their sham marriage would happen under the watchful eye of the Lucky Charms leprechaun. The proportions of the pantry are such that standing groin-to-groin is a given and Patrick doesn’t even get distracted. Patrick is pretty fucking pissed. 

“Why the hell didn’t you tell me you were representing my boss in the breakdown of his fucking marriage?” Patrick hisses. 

He’s definitely hit a 7 on the INES. An 8, maybe. A fucking 57. A stumponuclear disaster. Still, at least the wild, sweaty panic over Pete representing Brendon in court is cancelling out the wild, sweaty panic over possible heart-and-dick feelings for Pete. 

Pete doesn’t look apologetic at all. “Are you kidding me right now? Why didn’t you tell me your boss is Brendon _ Urie?” _

“Oh, so this is my fault?” Patrick snaps, folding his arms. 

Pete blinks slowly. “Yeah,” he says, in tones of ‘no d’uh’. “I mean, obviously it’s your fault. Who else would you blame for this?”

“You’re not supposed to work divorces!” Patrick screeches. Or, Patrick attempts to screech, until Pete slaps a hand over his mouth. 

“Do you promise to stop yelling if I move my hand?” Patrick maintains aggressive eye contact and licks Pete’s palm. “Gross,” Pete yelps, pulling his hand away.

“Oh, God,” Patrick whimpers, not dwelling on the taste of Pete’s skin, or other specific bedroom scenarios in which Pete might slap a hand over his mouth.  _ “Of course  _ he’s divorcing Ryan! That’s why I got the live stream! You told me your dad moved you into corporate. You said—”

“I’m the managing partner’s son, my name is  _ literally _ over the door! If something like this comes in, the client expects to talk to a Wentz,” Pete hisses, palming his face with both hands. “Fuck. This is a big, big mess you’ve gotten me into, Patrick. Huge. Like, I cannot overstate the magnitude of this fuck up. My dad is gonna be  _ so pissed _ , like—fuck! Fuck, fuck, fuck!”

When Pete phrases it like  _ that,  _ Patrick starts to feel a little guilty. This isn’t supposed to affect Pete, after all. Patrick guaranteed that, didn’t he? Patrick said it would be fun, it would be over in five days, it would be, at worst, an inconvenience. The only career supposed to risk ruin in this whole sorry debacle was Patrick’s. He pulls his lip between his teeth and thinks fast. 

“Okay,” Patrick says, spreading his hands and poking Pete in the ribs in the process. The closet is so small. They should’ve had this conversation anywhere else in the house. “Okay, the good news is, I don’t think Brendon thinks we set this up. It’s just—a coincidence, right? A horrible, horrible coincidence. Did you ever tell him about your amazing, talented husband?”

Pete looks at Patrick like he’s very stupid, and also very annoying. “No, Patrick. Funny thing, but I don’t tend to discuss the details of my entirely fucking fake personal life with my clients. Do you have  _ any idea _ how much trouble I’m in?”

“Said as if I’m coping well with this!” Patrick squeaks. “What I’m saying is, I think this is a new complication, but I don’t necessarily think we can’t stick the landing.” 

“This is a bad idea. This is the  _ worst _ idea,” Pete says. Patrick’s not sure Pete’s talking about Brendon and WtHITV anymore. The alternative is too much for Patrick to bear.

“What choice do we have?” Patrick asks. “We either fake it and hope for the best, or we go out there and tell the truth and accept the consequences. We’ve already done the dumb thing, why not see if we can pull it off?”

Pete’s quiet for a long time. He looks at Patrick again, the same look he gave him in the hallway last night, the look that terrifies Patrick down to his fingers and toes because Patrick doesn’t  _ understand _ that look. Outside, in the world beyond the pantry door, there is bustle and hustle and someone shouting to someone else about a missing camera lens. Here in the dark, they feel like the last two people on earth. 

“Ugh,  _ fine,”  _ Pete says. “But you owe me. It’s the Christmas client mixer on Thursday and I swear to God, Patrick, you will show up and you will mingle and you will look absolutely goddamn  _ charmed _ by me.”

Honestly? Patrick can’t tell if he’s winning or losing at this point. He exhales every deep breath he’s taken in his life and curls closer to Pete on instinct. “Of course, honeybear. Whatever you need.”

Pete reaches for Patrick’s hand. Patrick doesn’t pull away, his fingers curling over Pete’s. They exchange a greasy film of panic sweat. It’s like taking a blood oath. Holding hands is a notable upside to the stupid plan, actually. It would be nice if they could move things along and start holding one another’s penises. 

“Good to go?” Patrick asks. Pete nods. 

Patrick theorises, downplays, and generally lies to himself.

Five days. No big deal. They can totally pull this off. 

There’s no way they can pull this off.

He thought they could; when it was theoretical, when he was still applying the same basic clinical principles of the studio to this whole fucking debacle. He could compartmentalise, then. He could keep Pete in a neat and very separate box to the rest of his thoughts and only take him out to examine him when it was appropriate, which was  _ never. _ Patrick did not imagine that having a camera crew sit him down in Pete’s living room to grill them on the minutiae of their marriage would be quite so… traumatic. 

The wardrobe assistant has dressed him in a grey button down, tight black jeans, and a cardigan the colour of mulled wine. It’s too long and folds over his hands in fuzzy woollen paws. There’s a neat little fedora on his head, a sprig of mistletoe in the hat band. He’s annoyed that this costume feels more real than the crew neck and blazer combo he generally defects toward. 

Pete, they’ve dressed in matching jeans, a white crew neck and black cardigan, unbuttoned. He’s so domestic. He’s so sexy. Patrick can’t fucking stand it. 

“Three years,” Pete’s saying to Brendon, “just after Brontë was born. We’ve been friends since college, so it felt very organic, very natural. Couldn’t be happier, could we, darling?”

Patrick feels his full emotional range play out on his face. The look he gives Pete passes through fear, panic, and wistfulness before landing on something in the vicinity of happiness. “Best years of my life,” says his mouth, with no input from his brain. 

They’re side by side on the loveseat in Pete’s living room, holding hands. Brontë sits between them, halfway into each lap. Pete keeps swiping his thumb over Patrick’s knuckles in a gesture designed to soothe. Patrick doesn’t wish to be soothed. Patrick really wants to yank his hand back into his lap where Pete can’t touch it. 

Never knowingly not sweaty, Patrick wipes his brow and wonders if it’s possible to commit suicide by flocking spray. Like, theoretically, is there an optimum volume of fake snow he could inhale and just end it all? If so, is that volume of fake snow present in the room right now?

“I don’t understand why we need to do this,” Patrick bleats. “I’ve watched a lot of Barefoot Contessa and I can’t remember a single time they did this to her and Jeffrey.” 

Brendon stops barking orders at the terrified intern re-trimming Pete’s tree. Re-trimming the tree is a serious business. Patrick spent a lot of time decorating the tree, but Brendon has a vision and now three interns are scurrying around with stepladders, rehanging the ornaments to complement the cascades of gold ribbon. There’s so much garland Patrick’s beginning to feel personally responsible for deforestation. If Brontë stands still long enough, chances are someone will wrap her in twinkle lights. 

Brendon looks at Patrick with a raised eyebrow. “How do you suppose we’re going to build viewer rapport if they don’t see the two of you looking gross and in love?” he asks. Patrick considers recreational executive murder, running away, and changing his name, in that order. “Show don’t tell, Patrick. Don’t you remember that from college?”

“I think that applies to prose, not fake spouses,” Patrick mutters into Brontë’s hair. 

“Silly,” says Brontë, patting his cheek.

“What was that?” Brendon says. 

“I said I’m used to doing this in other people’s houses,” Patrick says cheerfully, sliding Pete a broad wink. Pete snorts, some of the tension uncoiling in his shoulders. 

“The three of you are so cute together,” Brendon says. He doesn’t look thrilled about it. “It’s disgusting.”

“It’s what happens when you marry your best friend,” Pete says, bumping Patrick’s shoulder with his own. 

Brendon sighs. “Great. I have to watch my  _ divorce lawyer _ cute it up.”

He looks a little sad about it, a little wistful. Patrick feels an unexpected pang of sympathy. It must be tough, getting divorced at Christmas. 

“What can I say, Patrick’s my other half,” Pete says. He doesn’t mean to play a concerto on Patrick’s heartstrings when he says that. Patrick’s sure of it. 

“Oh, please, spare me,” Brendon says, with exaggerated gagging noises.

“I’m serious, it’s like... cryptophasia. Patrick gets me, even when I don’t get me. Best buddies, soulmates, opposite sides of the same coin.”

In a gesture so natural Patrick almost believes it himself, Pete leans forward and presses a tiny kiss to the corner of Patrick’s mouth. 

Patrick has a real problem processing that. No one has ever kissed him with so much tenderness, and it’s a little hurtful that the one time they  _ do,  _ it’s not real. Getting mad at Pete is not an option. He invited himself into Pete’s home, after all. He asked Pete to cover for him and it’s not Pete’s fault Patrick’s getting the lies in his head all tangled up with the truth in his heart. He smiles hard enough that no one can see the cracks splintering through his chest. He resolves to cry later, when he’s alone in the guest room. 

“I…” Patrick starts, touching the spot left behind by Pete’s mouth. It feels warm, like every tingling blood cell in Patrick’s body has raced to the point of contact. That or he’s about to spontaneously combust. 

“Hold that thought,” Brendon says. “I think we’re ready to start blocking. Channel your inner perfect American family, kids.”

Patrick tries to look thrilled _. _ He tries to look like a happily married father of one. He smiles, even though he might be on the verge of an emotional breakdown. When this is over? Finding a decent therapist is the first thing on his to-do list.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Feelings! Feelings _everywhere!_


	9. Chapter 9

Filming is not a disaster. No one is more surprised by this than Patrick. 

It doesn’t hurt that Pete’s a natural, at Patrick’s side for every cue, looking handsome and relaxed and husband-y. He’s good at this, suspiciously good. It’s probably because he’s a lawyer, fine tuned in the art of spinning believable bullshit. With the cameras rolling, Patrick starts to feel like a husband, like a dad, like the three of them are part of an exclusive gang. Like he’s part of a family. 

At least, he thinks that when he’s not thinking about producing edible-looking canapes in front of a live international audience. “We have viewers in  _ Ulaanbaatar,  _ Patrick,” Brendon told him, delighted, during a commercial break. Patrick googled Ulaanbaatar and did not feel delighted. Patrick felt sweaty and short of breath and on the verge of a sudden, hysteria-induced asthma attack. Patrick cannot bear to imagine the potential scope for his humiliation. He cannot bear to imagine memes in Mongolian. 

Patrick ducks under the counter and takes a medicinal swig from the cooking brandy. It doesn’t cool him down but it does take the edge off the panicky Pete Thoughts. Besides, it’s only alcoholism if they catch it on camera. 

“Honey, they look  _ great, _ it’s like we’re at the ballpark,” Pete enthuses, taking a bite of a miniature Chicago dog, complete with tiny poppy seed bun and bright green pickle relish. He pulls his best ‘mm’ face for the camera. Is it Patrick’s fault if he transposes this, twists it, imagines the face Pete might pull at the apex of a really good blowjob? He’s not a perv, it’s a natural reaction to the shape of the sausage.

“Thank you, sweetheart,” Patrick says, staggering out from behind the island and almost missing his cue. “These are great with, uh, with the onion and tomato served on the side, so your guests can, um. So they can pick out the things they like. What tastes good, you know?” 

His mouth is a little numb, a little heavy on spit and foolish, wanting tongue. The skin that stretches between Pete’s ear and his shoulder hums like a fucking  _ beacon.  _

Pete leans closer and slides his hand into the small of Patrick’s back. “Everything looks amazing,” he says, and he’s not looking at the canapes. Without thinking, Patrick turns and brushes his mouth against the edge of Pete’s jaw. Pete knocks his nose lightly against Patrick’s and Patrick just about drowns in a wave of woodsy Pete-smell. 

“Hey, Patrick,” Pete breathes, his mouth close to Patrick’s ear, his voice low and sexy and rough. 

The cameras and crew and viewing public of WtHITV fade. God, Pete’s voice. The only logical conclusion to a growl like that is  _ I have an early Christmas gift for you, I’ll give you a hint: it’s in my underpants and it’s definitely not socks.  _

“Yeah?” Patrick murmurs, fisting a handful of Pete’s shirt. It’s the cooking brandy making him behave like this. That, and Patrick’s not allowed to use Grindr for the duration of their fake marriage, so at least 80-percent of this is residual horn. 

“I think something’s on fire.”

Patrick’s about to say something cheesy and ridiculous like  _ only my burning loins, baby,  _ but then the smell of actual burning hits. “Crap! The quiches!” 

Patrick hurls himself at the oven at warp speed. At the last minute, before he seizes a tray the same temperature as Mordor  _ with his bare hands,  _ Pete hits him in the face with an oven mitt. Patrick yanks out twenty-four charred-looking mini quiche disasters and blinks sadly into the camera. Sexually and professionally humiliated, he can’t even make eye contact with Brendon right now.

“It’s important to remember that sometimes you’ll make mistakes,” he flusters. “It’s, uh… not a big deal, right? It’s, um. We should probably just…”

Does he wish for a localised sinkhole to open up and swallow him? Yes, he does. Does he want to curl up behind the island and cry at how ridiculous he feels—for burning the stupid quiches, for misinterpreting Pete’s intentions, for getting himself into this position in the first place? Yes, on all counts. A thousand times. None of that is unexpected. 

What Patrick doesn’t expect is Pete to lean past him, grab one of the burnt and smoking salmon quiches and shove it—whole, magma-hot—into his mouth. Pete holds intense eye contact with Camera One, chews, swallows and doesn’t flinch. 

“Delicious,” he declares, loyal even in the face of burnt fish. “The smoke really adds something, you know? Chestnuts roasting on an open fire and whatnot. Very festive. Great job, babe.”

Patrick stares at Pete, open-mouthed. He can’t fathom what would make a man swallow an oven-hot, overdone canape. Instead of analysing it, which he’ll do later, at length, he screws up his face and says, with extreme caution, “Um, can I get you a glass of water?”

“Nope,” Pete says. “I want to taste this  _ forever.” _

There might be a tiny, distracting blister popping up on his bottom lip. Patrick wouldn’t know, because Patrick is never looking at Pete’s mouth ever again. Pete’s mouth is not worth losing his job. Or else, Pete’s mouth is worth losing his job, but only if Pete wants to kiss Patrick with his lovely, blistered mouth and Pete doesn’t, so… no mouth-staring. Patrick crushes that thought all the way down to a rich, mealy powder and fetches Pete a glass of water. 

“Idiot,” he says fondly. To the camera, he says, “Okay, that glaze we were working on should be just about perfect...” and just like that, the show goes on. 

When filming wraps, Patrick retreats to the back porch for a well-earned breakdown. 

He paces the wooden veranda, wearing crop circles into the boards he painted last summer. He kicks the locally-sourced log basket by the back door. He smacks at the hand-made Christmas wreath and scowls at the 11,918 warm white bulbs wrapped around Pete’s house. Pete’s house does not look like this on any other given holiday. It’s a farcical representation of family life and Patrick’s constructed it and he’s not even  _ party  _ to this fucking family. He’s an interloper. An interloper who won’t even have a job in the new year, because Brendon’s going to fire him for thinking about blowing Pete instead of keeping an eye on the stupid mini quiches. Patrick is pathetic. 

“Well,” says a voice behind him. Patrick jumps, turns, and finds Brendon slipping out onto the porch behind him. “That was… interesting.”

Patrick goes deer-in-headlights still. The only movement is his heartbeat flickering under his shirt. 

“I’ve been watching the playback,” Brendon goes on. “It’s… quite something.”

“I know I messed up the quiches,” Patrick says quickly. “It was a stupid mistake, I was concentrating on the hot dogs and then I got distracted. I should’ve set a timer, or—”

“You got distracted by Pete,” Brendon interrupts. The last of Patrick’s dignity slithers across the porch and makes a break for Lake Michigan, just beyond the tree line. “I want to see more of it.”

Patrick looks at Brendon with barely disguised professional fear. “You want to see me... burn canapes?”

“I was watching the social media feeds while we were broadcasting,” Brendon says. Patrick sees no link between this and the opening bars of their conversation, but he’s prepared to see how it builds. “It was exactly what we were expecting, the usual peaks and dips, interest dropping off a little after the first ten minutes, peaking during commercial breaks. Then a funny thing happened.”

“Oh?” Patrick prompts, when the silence becomes too terrible to bear. 

“When you burnt the quiches, the socials went insane,” Brendon says. “Like, specifically, when Pete ate the fucking murder quiche. Who does that, by the way? Just crams in a mouthful of solid carbon? It was basically charcoal, Patrick. Like, there’s no conceivable way that thing tasted anything but awful.” 

Patrick’s inclined to agree but elects to keep his mouth closed since no one has mentioned anything about anyone getting fired. 

“The two of you are—and it pains me to say this—perfect for this,” Brendon goes on. “I need more of that natural, cutesy, married-to-my-soulmate bullshit. The viewers love it and I can’t buy it in.”

Patrick’s brain short circuits. He lights up like the aggressively re-trimmed Christmas tree. This lasts for three seconds before he remembers that Pete’s not actually his to get excited about, is he? So they fooled a couple of opinionated reactionaries on Twitter. What difference does that make to Patrick’s life? None at all, that’s what. 

“Of course,” he says, with a professional smile. 

They’re silent for a time, watching the shadows move across the back yard. Patrick still tingles where Pete pressed up against him, burning with the aggressive agony of touch. 

“So,” Brendon says eventually, “where should we bunk down for the night?”

Patrick’s head snaps to the left as if compelled by invisible force. “Excuse me?”

“It’s snowing,” Brendon says, which it is, but that’s not Patrick’s fault, he doesn’t control winter precipitation or lake-effect weather. “We have an early start tomorrow. It’s a big house. Don’t worry, we won’t intrude on your marital bed.”

“Um?” Patrick says again. There is no way Patrick can share a bed with Pete  _ now. _ He’s popping boners in the hallway  _ outside _ of Pete’s bedroom. How many blood vessels will he rupture if he strays toward the bed?

“So, it’s settled then. The crew and I will just crash here.”

“Um,” Patrick squeaks, from somewhere outside of his own body. It’s too late. Brendon’s already heading back inside, kicking slush from his shoes, dusting snow from his hair. Patrick’s whole body is rigid with horny fear. 

Patrick’s fucked. He’s so, so fucked. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *gasp* And they were _roommates_!


	10. Chapter 10

Patrick spends a long time in the bathroom. Like, an amount of time that’s notable. Lurking, or hiding, or avoiding the inevitable moment he has to share a bed with Pete. He’s brushed and flossed. He’s washed his hair three times, a totally acceptable number because the back of the bottle says ‘repeat as needed’ and it doesn’t say what’s needed, exactly, but, God, Patrick needs a  _ minute. _

He peeks around the bathroom door and there’s Pete, sprawled on the bed in his boxers. He’s absorbed in a broken-backed paperback, one arm thrown over his head, really giving Patrick the opportunity to stare. He is so gorgeous as to border on the obscene. 

“Hey, you,” Pete says, marking his page with his thumb and grinning at Patrick. “Thought we’d lost you for a—”

Patrick slams the door and slumps against the vanity. Okay,  _ ten  _ minutes. 

Patrick rationalises. He takes a metaphorical step back from the whole…  _ situation  _ here, and tries to think clearly. He needs to calm down. It’s just like a craft project; he needs to unpick the threads, identify the problem, and then fix it. Easy. 

Pete pretending to love Patrick back is the problem. In theory, Patrick was prepared for it, but in theory, Patrick knows about metaphysics, quantum mechanics, and the basic principles of aeronautic flight. He still couldn’t build an airplane, pilot the international space station or travel through time. Pretending to love the Pete that’s pretending to love him is a series of escalating untruths and blurred lines. He cannot fucking stand it.

Before Patrick can sink further into the sticky depths of unhelpful self-analysis, Pete speaks, his voice very loud for someone Patrick thought was on the other side of the bedroom.

“Yo, stink butt, you coming out any time soon?”

Patrick doesn’t scream. He doesn’t. He makes a totally manly noise of panicked surprise because Pete’s not supposed to just… talk to him through the bathroom door, like, what the fuck? He takes a deep breath then shoves his sweaty face into the bedroom. 

“Oh,” he sniffs. “It’s you.”

Pete looks confused. “Were you expecting someone else?”

“Expecting. Hoping for. Whatever,” Patrick says, shouldering past Pete and flopping onto the bed. He chooses the six square inches of mattress as far from Pete’s book, charging phone, and glass of water as possible.

“You’re such a Grinch,” Pete observes, worming his way across the mattress on his belly like a labrador seeking treats. “Santa will not stuff your stocking on Christmas Eve if you keep this up.”

“Ugh, can he bring me a new fake husband? I think this one’s defective,” Patrick retorts, shoving Pete away with his foot. 

“You’re stuck with me,” Pete says, pinning Patrick with an arm over his waist. Then a thigh over Patrick’s hips. Then his whole body draped over Patrick’s back like a Linus blanket. Patrick is pinned under a buck-seventy of solid, immovable husband material. The fucking indignity.

“Lucky me,” Patrick mutters, his face smushed into the comforter.

“I just think you could look a little happier about this,” Pete says, pressing his cold nose to the back of Patrick’s neck. “Your boss is buying it, right?”

“My boss is an idiot,” Patrick points out. “Don’t try to make me feel better by talking about my boss.”

“Your boss is a nice guy,” Pete says. Patrick makes a mental note to keep Pete as far from Brendon as he physically can. The same house is too close. Adjacent continents are too close. 

Patrick tips onto his back and looks at Pete, considering. They are now crotch to crotch, a position Patrick is not thinking about. “Isn’t he also  _ your  _ boss, technically?” 

“No, he’s my  _ client,” _ Pete points out. “Very different. Don’t you feel sorry for him? He’s getting divorced. At Christmas. You should try being nicer to him, he’s probably really fucking sad.”

“He stole my bedroom. That’s a dick move.”

“He doesn’t know that, he thinks  _ this _ is your bedroom.”

“He’s wrong. I would never share a bedroom with you. You’re gross and annoying.”

“It hurts my feelings when you say things like that.”

“That implies you have feelings. You’re a  _ divorce  _ attorney, apparently. You barely qualify as human.”

“I’m saving your ass here, and, like,  _ risking  _ my own. The least you could do is act grateful.”

“I’m very grateful,” Patrick says levelly. “Thank you so much for going along with my horrible idea and ruining my life.”

“I give up.” Pete flops onto his back, flips Patrick off and stares at the ceiling. “Are you okay, though?” he asks. “Like, did we do alright? This isn’t… weird for you, is it?”

What, pretending to be married to his best friend? It’s  _ very weird.  _ This is the weirdest thing in Patrick’s done to date. 

“Er,” Patrick begins. Even now, he hedges. “I dunno… is it weird for you?”

“I think it’s kind of weird how  _ not _ weird being married to you feels,” Pete says, reaching across the bed and taking Patrick’s hand. “That’s kind of weird, right?”

Patrick feels heat sear up his neck. He moves his eyes but not his head and looks at Pete in profile until Pete looks back. His hair, normally gelled up and off his forehead, is wilting over his brow. His eyes are such an intense light brown. They’re light brown in the same way the sky is blue, or roses are red. They define what it means to be light brown. 

Patrick wrenches his eyes away and shrugs. The unbearable tension breaks, or else stretches and becomes a new, worse kind of tension. “We’re doing great,” he says. “Brendon’s happy, I’m happy, Brontë doesn’t need therapy. No one suspects a thing. Good job, buckeroo.”

Pete gives Patrick another one of those looks Patrick can’t interpret. “No. No, I guess they don’t.”

“I’ll get up early in the morning, so Brontë doesn’t ask any weird questions,” Patrick says, turning away to mess with his phone. 

“Yeah,” Pete says. “Sure thing.”

“And in the new year, I’ll tell Brendon we’re getting a divorce and you’re off the hook for husband duties,” Patrick finishes, addressing the night stand.

“Oh,” Pete says. Patrick gets the feeling there’s a lot of layers to that one syllable, stacking up on top of one another. Patrick’s getting that feeling around Pete a lot, lately. Sometimes, their conversations feel like a book Patrick wrote, and Pete’s tiny inferences are notes left behind in the margins. “Yeah. That’s great. I… Goodnight, I guess.” 

Pete rolls over and turns off the lamp. Patrick watches the snow drifting down just beyond the window. The road to damnation is paved with untruth.

“Goodnight,” he says, mostly to himself.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And that, my friends, is what happens when the universe hands you an opportunity and you throw it against a wall!


	11. Chapter 11

Obviously, Patrick doesn’t wake up early. Patrick’s never knowingly woken early in his life. Waking early is for losers with desk jobs. When Patrick wakes up, the sun is streaming through the bedroom window and the interns are making noise downstairs and there’s an erection pressing into the small of his back and a warm hand cupping his sleep-warm semi-stiff junk through his boxers. That’s new.

Imbued with the holiday spirit and season of sharing, Patrick bites his lip and presses back into the dick. It’s a good boner too, he can tell. The enthusiastic kind, the  _ touch me _ kind, the wet-tipped, blood-filled, nosing around in the crack of his ass kind. Patrick’s about to roll over and introduce himself when he remembers he’s in Pete’s bed, and that’s Pete’s hand on his penis, and—powers of deduction, don’t desert him now—that’s Pete’s hard on.  _ Fuck,  _ Patrick thinks, and opens his eyes.

Brontë’s nose is inches from his own. She’s staring at him intently. It’s unclear how long she’s been there or what she intends to do to him. Patrick is unnerved. Blood ricocheting away from his penis so fast he gets circulatory whiplash, Patrick yelps.

“Hello, Sticky,” she rasps. She sounds like she smokes forty cigarettes a day. She sounds like Greta Garbo. She sounds like an itsy-bitsy serial killer. Kids. They’re three ounces of cute from a full-blown horror show.

Patrick wriggles away from Pete’s dick as if stung, blinks, and fishes out a gen-rated greeting. “Uh… B?”

“This is  _ daddy’s  _ bed,” she growls, in her scary little voice. “You’re in  _ daddy’s _ bed.”

Patrick can’t think of a single clever thing to say to that, so he nods and sits up and wipes the grit from his eyes. By some miracle, Pete’s still sleeping. Patrick’s pleased because between work and Brontë and insomnia, Pete never gets to sleep late. He can’t wake a sleeping Pete. It goes against everything Patrick stands for as a friend, a confidante, a man who adores sleeping more than any known waking activity. 

He casts a quick glance at Pete’s boxers and corrects himself.  _ Most  _ waking activities. 

“Why are you awake so early?” he asks Brontë. 

Brontë sighs. “Is so  _ loud noises. _ Do we wake daddy now? For breakfast. Daddy!”

He catches Brontë under the armpits, mid-aerial assault on Pete’s midsection. “Slow down, muffin. We’re going to play a game.”

“I like games!” she shrieks. 

“Shh, sweetie. The game is called leave the bedroom without making a sound. Winner gets pancakes.”

“Hot choc-choc?” she whispers back. Her eyes narrow with implicit threat. 

“Hot choc-choc,” he confirms. 

Patrick snags Pete’s Cubs sweater from the chair by the bed and looks back at Pete one last time. He’s sprawled on his front, his misbehaving erection buried in the tuft of his mattress, his mouth slack, drool on his chin. Patrick’s starting to resent him the sweet release of unconsciousness, but then Pete grabs Patrick’s abandoned pillow and buries his nose in it, breathing deeply with a happy little huff. Patrick closes the door on Pete and his feelings and follows Brontë down into the kitchen.

Brendon is sitting at the island, scrolling through his phone and his iPad  _ and  _ reading the newspaper. At the same time. Patrick would be impressed if Brendon’s presence in the kitchen wasn’t so unsettling. There should be laws and constitutional amendments against the wearing of pyjamas in front of one’s direct superior. Patrick opens the fridge and wonders who he needs to email to make that a reality. 

“Good morning… uh...” Patrick says, hesitating a little at the end of the greeting. Is this a ‘sir’ scenario? Or now they’re on Patrick’s turf is ‘Brendon’ okay? Maybe he should compromise with ‘Mr. U’. Formal but playful. 

“Brendon is fine,” Brendon says, not looking up and not saying good morning.

Patrick sticks his head in the fridge and hums. “Cool. Cool, cool.”

“The interns brought coffee,” Brendon says, nodding to a tray of cardboard cups on the counter. “And donuts, if that’s a thing you’re interested in.”

“Coffee, yes, sugar and cream,” Brontë says, making grabby hands like she’s forty-five years old and it’s something she drinks all the time. See, this is what Patrick  _ means _ when he tells Pete to stop single-handedly propping up Starbucks Midwestern endeavours. 

“Sure, kid,” Brendon says, sliding her a cup. Brontë looks surprised that it was  _ that _ easy and reaches out for the cup. 

“I don’t think so,” Patrick says, swiping it before she can make contact. “We do not give toddlers coffee unless we’re volunteering ourselves to peel the toddler off the ceiling in twenty minutes. Or to clean up the inevitable barf factory. Or to fistfight her dad—uh, her  _ other _ dad—when he finds out we’ve given her coffee.”

Brendon and Brontë share a look that says they both think Patrick’s dramatic and kind of an asshole.

“Sticky,” she tells Brendon, “is silly.”

“Sticky? You call your dad  _ Sticky _ …?” Brendon says, looking suspicious.

Brontë opens her mouth to speak, and obviously Patrick can’t allow  _ that _ to happen. Disaster! Imminent hostile threat! Patrick buries her whole head in the donut box, like a good father, and combats potential toddler intervention with the only artillery he has: volume. “Wow! Look at that, B! Donuts! Take them all!” 

In the ensuing sugarfest, Brendon loses interest. Patrick and Bronte eat donuts together. Brendon frowns at something on his iPad, double checks it on his phone and then swears under his breath. “Fucking Gerard, riding my ass again,” he hisses, to the iPad. Then: “The interns are just setting up the living room for the wreath making,” he says, probably at Patrick.

“Awesome,” Patrick says. Then he adds, “Um… do they have names?”

“The wreaths?” Brendon says, looking up, surprised. “I don’t know. I didn’t ask.”

Patrick rolls his eyes so hard he sees brain matter. “No, Brendon. The interns. Do the  _ interns _ have names?”

Brendon looks thoughtful. “Oh, them. I mean… I guess they do. It’d be weird if their parents didn’t name them. I’ve been calling them Hey, You, and Now.”

Patrick scowls. He remembers being an intern. He remembers running and fetching and carrying and smiling cheerfully through the urge to strangle assholes like Brendon who talked to him like he was stupid, if they bothered to talk to him at all. It’s not a memory that fills him with holiday cheer. He decides he’ll find out their names later so he can pull some strings once he’s back in the office. In the meantime, he slides a box of donuts into the cabinet for them to share, before the paid production staff hoover up every bite. 

He turns to Brontë, his hands on his fuzzy plaid hips. “Okay, kiddo. Pink donut, or blue?”

“Pink  _ and  _ blue?”

“Both, huh? Like your dad. Uh—your  _ other _ dad. Yeah, both is good.”

Hanging with Brontë is Patrick’s favourite thing in the world. He sings Christmas songs with Pete’s kiddo and they eat donuts and it’s nice until Brendon’s phone rings.

“Urie,” he says. Then his face crumples. “Oh, hi. Yeah, I’m probably not going to make it to the… uh, the thing. Sorry.”

The tinny voice on the other end of the line sounds pissed off. “No, I get that,” Brendon says, “it’s just, I’m working. I… No, no, I understand. Look, can you stop… Now really isn’t the best time, Ry… I didn’t say that, stop putting words in my… Come on, that’s unfair, you can’t take the… Okay, you know what? Fine. Do whatever you want. I’ll talk to my lawyer.”

Brendon slams his phone down onto the counter with screen-shattering force. He looks like he’s going to cry. Patrick feels every fine vein, every muscle, every sinew in his face calcify with professional horror. It is the most awkward, the most terrible moment of his work life to date aside from the many, linked moments that make up the past twenty-four hours. He didn’t sign up to witness the romantic humiliation of his boss, alone, without backup. All he wanted to do was let Pete sleep late. Well, if this is where being nice gets him, Patrick will assume his spot on the naughty list. He stares at the kitchen light and avoids eye contact with  _ everything. _

“Would you… like me to fetch your lawyer?” he asks, after a painful silence, wincing at his own social ineptitude. It’s a wonder there’s room for words in his mouth what with both his feet jammed in there.

“No.”

“Do you want to talk—”

“No! I don’t need to talk to a happily married man about my failing marriage.”

Patrick nods and snaps his mouth closed. He definitely doesn’t point out that technically, Brendon  _ does _ need to talk about his marriage with a quote-happily married man-close quote, because the man he needs to talk to is Pete and Pete is, as far as Brendon knows, happily married to Patrick. He doesn’t point that out, because his continued employment seems balanced on not making the situation worse. 

With horrible timing, Pete wanders into the kitchen. His hair is a nest of swoops and spikes, his mouth flushed, his sweatpants slouching low enough that a lot of attractive hip bone is on display. He looks like a man who had happily married sex last night. This is as problematic for Patrick as it is for Brendon, but for wildly different reasons. 

“Good morning,” Pete says cheerfully, skilled in not reading a room. “I hope everyone slept as well as I did.”

He kisses Brontë on the nose and steals a bite of her donut. He loops a casual arm around Patrick’s waist and presses his face to Patrick’s neck in another of those knee-tremblingly intimate gestures that somehow manage to look completely natural to everyone else in the room. Brendon looks on the verge of a major coronary incident. Patrick would like, very much, to die right now.

“Uh, Pete,” Patrick starts.

“What a gorgeous day,” Pete says, smiling. Before Patrick can derail him, Pete plows his conversational car through the snowdrift of awkward silence and says  _ exactly _ what Brendon does not want to hear. “What a gorgeous family! Which lucky son of a gun gets a family like this, huh? Look at you guys. Brendon, buddy, look at my family. Amazing, aren’t they? God, I am so, so lucky I’ve got—”

Brendon storms outside, slamming the door behind him. He doesn’t grab a jacket, or a scarf, or shoes. The kitchen chills by several kelvins, and not just because of the icy air he let in through the back door. 

Pete looks at Brontë, then at Patrick. His face is a holiday card of confusion. “Was it something I said?”

Patrick lets out a wordless squeak of annoyance. He tries not to touch the spot on his neck where Pete’s mouth touched him. He needs some air. He needs to talk to someone who hates love and family and Christmas as much as Patrick does, right at this moment. He grabs Pete’s impossibly Pete-smelling jacket and stuffs his arms inside.

“Where are you going?” Pete asks. 

“I’m going to talk to him,” Patrick says. He adds, “God. I can’t believe you  _ said  _ that. You’re  _ such _ an asshole,” because he’s annoyed and confused and Pete’s the only person in the room he can take it out on. 

He leaves Pete in the kitchen, looking bewildered. He shoves his feet into a pair of convenient crocs—why does Pete own  _ crocs?— _ and he follows Brendon out into the snow. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Morning wood. It always leads to trouble.


	12. Chapter 12

Patrick cannot believe he is actually, legitimately dashing through the snow. He can’t believe he’s doing it in his pyjamas. He extra super can’t believe he’s giving chase to his _boss_ so they can bond over the fact that the men in their lives are idiots who do not deserve them. What even is his life right now? What is he _thinking?_

“Brendon, wait,” he hollers at Brendon’s back. 

Brendon doesn’t turn, or show signs of slowing down. “Go away,” he shouts, and keeps going. So, Patrick has no choice but to keep going too, despite all evolutionary safeguards telling him to stop and go back and find an armchair by the fire and a medicinal hot toddy. 

“Fuck! Fuck me, it is _so cold._ It’s so, so cold,” Patrick mutters to himself. Brendon is so not worth hypothermia. He doesn’t even let the team put Christmas drinks on expenses, and now he’s going to freeze to death and Patrick’s going to go to jail for negligent homicide. He speeds up. “Brendon! Mr. Urie! Uh, sir…? Come on, man. It’s freezing out here. Get back inside.”

Meltwater is leaking through the holes in Patrick’s crocs. Annoying, since Patrick always assumed the holes were there to let the wearer’s dignity leak _out._ He’s soaked to the knees and Pete’s jacket is seriously inadequate in the face of a Midwestern winter. Brendon’s halfway across the three-quarters-of-an-acre of Hallmark-perfect snowy backyard. After that, it’s a couple of clicks through scrubby forest, the open water of the lake, and, eventually, Michigan. No one’s life has ever been significantly improved by _Michigan._

Brendon makes it as far as the swing set and collapses, his head in his hands. It’s an impressive distance for someone not wearing shoes. The sarcastic part of Patrick wants to congratulate him. The employed part of Patrick knows this is a bad idea. He compromises by collapsing onto the seat next to Brendon and wheezing, “Jesus Christ, Brendon. What the actual fuck? It’s ten below. Shoes!”

“I’m fine,” says Brendon, clearly not fine at all. 

“You are from _Las Vegas,”_ Patrick says severely. “You’re not indiginous to the fucking Midwest. Put this on.”

Patrick pulls off Pete’s jacket to hand to Brendon and just about has a heart attack at the physical force of the cold. 

“Fuck you,” says Brendon. He does not accept the jacket, so, that’s gratitude for you.

Brendon looks up. He’s crying, but with a look on his face that says Patrick should not even think about acknowledging the fact. “Bren,” Patrick says softly. “Are you okay?”

“Never better,” Brendon snaps. Patrick fumbles in the pocket of Pete’s jacket in search of tissues. They’re there—half a pack of Kleenex, the nice ones, with the balm. For someone who used to forget his wallet, car keys, underwear, Pete’s alarmingly efficient in fatherhood. Patrick peels a tissue from the pack and solemnly hands it over. 

Patrick chooses his next words with caution. “Is this… the first Christmas? Without him?”

Brendon wipes his face and looks miserable. That’s progress, because Brendon’s not telling him to fuck off or trying to wade into the lake or anything dramatic like that. Patrick stares into the middle distance and shuffles his feet through the snow. He’s not good at small talk. Like, he’s really, really not good at small talk. He sits perfectly still, aside from the shivering, and hopes all this will just go away. 

“He left me,” Brendon says eventually. “I haven’t told anyone, but he saw lawyers first. It was, um, all his decision, and he’s never really told me _why,_ you know? Is that pathetic?”

Patrick shakes his head and looks sympathetic. “That sucks.”

“And now I’m here, with you and Pete, watching the two of you,” Brendon says. “That thing with the quiche made me realise I won’t have something like that this year. It’s possible I’ll never have something like that at all and it’s… it’s so _hard,_ you know?”

Patrick doesn’t know, but he nods anyway. “Yeah.”

“You’re so in love with him,” Brendon sighs.

Patrick takes a big panicky breath and pastes on a big shiny smile and nods until his vision blurs. Somehow, he doesn’t screech “IS IT THAT OBVIOUS?” or “PLEASE, DO NOT FUCKING TELL HIM!” even though he really wants to. 

When Brendon goes on, his voice is quiet, reflective. “And he’s so in love with you. Fuck. How do I convince someone to look at me the way Pete looks at you?”

There’s a rock the size of Hale-Bopp lodged in Patrick’s throat. The only reason Patrick does not blush is because, at this point, all the blood in his body is devoted to keeping his organs warm and staving off frostbite. “I don’t—How does Pete look at me, exactly?”

“Like you hung the moon,” Brendon says wistfully. “And, honestly? I don’t think Ryan looked at me like that once. Not even once. The two of you have something so special. You should hang onto that with both hands.”

Patrick’s realising that love is a rose in a tangled, thorny mess of disappointments. Grabbing a handful of pricks is an occupational hazard.

He’s going to say that, truly, he is, but instead his open mouth says, “There’s plenty of mini salmon quiches in the sea.” 

Not what he was hoping for. Before he dies of embarrassment, there’s movement in the trees at the edge of the yard. 

“Uh, Patrick?” Brendon starts. “Why is a man in full Arctic exploration gear crossing your lawn?”

Patrick frowns. He has no idea. “I have no idea,” he says. 

Because Patrick’s ritual humiliation is never complete unless there’s an audience to witness it, the back door opens and Pete appears. He’s wearing a thick coat, scarf, boots, like a normal person. “Andy?” he’s shouting. “What the fuck, _Andy?_ Is that you?”

Patrick hopes, ardently, that it is not Andy. Andy is Pete’s best friend from college and Patrick likes him plenty, but Andy’s been in Canada for the past two years. Andy doesn’t know The Plan. Holiday serial killers, foreclosing bank managers, fucking _Santa himself;_ none of these things are a problem, but Patrick cannot cope with Andy. How does he keep getting himself into these situations? Does he deserve them? Is he, fundamentally, a terrible person? He suspects the answer is an unhelpful _yes_ on both counts. 

“The one and only,” Andy calls back cheerfully, pulling off his hat and ruining Patrick’s day. “Sorry I didn’t call. I figured I’d hike the last few miles along the shoreline and then I remembered Pete lives here and—You know how it goes, right?”

Patrick has no idea how that goes, actually. Patrick’s never felt compelled to hike along the frozen shore of Lake Michigan and doubts that he ever will. More to the point, Andy doesn’t say ‘I remembered _you_ and Pete live here’ because Andy doesn’t know Patrick is _supposed_ to live here. Things like that? They’re going to tip Brendon off. Their lie is only as strong as the people participating in it. 

“That’s Andy,” Patrick says to Brendon, attempting damage control. It’s like propping up a burning building with a toothpick. “And the thing about Andy, is that he’s spent the past few years in a research facility monitoring climate change. That can do things to a person, make them… remember things that did not happen, or forget things that _did,_ so, like, maybe don’t pay _too_ much attention to anything he says about me and Pete.”

“That… does not sound correct,” Brendon says, frowning. 

Pete covers the distance quickly until they all converge at the swing set like the terrible eye of Patrick’s trauma storm. Patrick squeaks, “Look! It’s _Andy!”_ He gives Pete a significant look, a look that says ‘Look! Our problem just got _bigger!’_ before Pete hands Brontë off like the Olympic torch and drags Andy into a hug. Brontë glomps to him like a tiny, Wentzian radiator, summer-warm in her thick coat, her Frozen snow boots catching him in the crotch a total of five, testicle-bruising times. “We have a problem,” Patrick whispers to her, because the grown-ups aren’t listening to him. “We have an actual _situation,_ B-Weezy.”

Brontë stuffs a hitherto unrevealed handful of snow down the back of his sweater. Cold water leaks down his spine and into the crack of his ass, which sums up his morning in a gesture, really. 

“Um, so,” Patrick says, putting himself between Andy and Brendon, “you’re probably wondering what’s going on. Maybe we should go inside and I can explain—”

“Joe told me everything. I mean, the line was a little spotty, but I think I got the gist,” Andy says. It’s official. Patrick is going to kill Joseph Trohman. 

“Did he tell you Brendon is my _boss?”_ Patrick says. He looks as meaningful as any man can, ankle-deep in snow, wearing plaid pyjamas and crocs. “Did he tell you we should keep things _very_ professional?”

Andy snatches Pete and Patrick into a rib-bruising hug. “He told me all sorts of things,” is all he says, still hugging. 

“I can explain,” Patrick squeaks, the words flitting over one another, a loosed dam of plausible deniability. “Just, come into the house and I’ll explain.”

“Don’t say another word.” Andy’s beaming from ear to ear. He clasps Patrick and Pete’s beringed hands in each of his own and looks positively giddy. “I can’t believe you got married without telling me!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In the words of the great 80s philosopher, Jon Bon Jovi, we're halfway there. 12 chapters left to turn this around. Can it even be done, you ask yourselves. You look hopefully at the author. The author is wearing clown shoes.


	13. Chapter 13

And that’s how Patrick finds himself at the kitchen table with a lawyer, a television producer and a climatologist. It’s like the setup to a terrible joke. Frozen with fear, Patrick suspects he’s the punchline. 

Thank God for Brontë. She scampers around them, tiny and interested and showing off for the two grown-ups she doesn’t know as much as the two she does. Shyness is not a personality trait she possesses, expunged by the prone to drama Wentzian half of her DNA. She climbs into laps, desperate for attention, asking questions and not waiting for the answer before she’s onto the next topic, the next person. She’s the ultimate distraction, the eye of every storm. Given the suspicious way Brendon’s staring at Patrick over the brim of his mug, Patrick can only assume this is a good thing. 

“So, Andy,” Brendon says, when Brontë has disappeared into the living room to fetch another toy or book or pack of crayons for everyone to admire. “How long have you known Pete and Patrick?

“Oh, I’ve known Pete  _ forever,”  _ Andy says, waving his hand from side to side. 

“Oh, come on, where did you meet? Everyone’s got an origin story,” Brendon laughs lightly. “Isn’t that right, Patrick?”

Patrick swallows half the contents of his mug in one hit. With any luck, he’ll drown before Andy expands on  _ that.  _

“How do you even keep track of a friendship that’s into double digits?” Andy says. “We were in terrible hardcore bands together all through high school and college. Never quite managed to shake one another off when we grew up and got real jobs.”

“And Patrick?” Brendon prompts. “Where does he come in?”

“Patrick came along when Pete and I were in grad school,” Andy shrugs. “It was adorable, honestly. I’ve never seen Pete so excited about meeting someone new.  _ I’ve got this golden kid,  _ he’d say. That was his go to conversation starter from the day he met Patrick. Totally in love with him. Everyone could see it. Well, everyone but Patrick.”

Patrick thinks he might be having a stroke. Of course Pete’s not in love with him! God, the misconception! The sexualisation of male friendship! Patrick’s gay but that doesn’t mean he crushes on every guy he meets! The defence mechanisms line up at the back of his tongue, hot, hard-tipped arrows, but then he remembers: he’s supposed to be  _ married _ to Pete. He’s not a lawyer, or anything like one, but he’s pretty sure shrieking “No homo!” at the top of his lungs will not strengthen their defence. 

“Aw,” Patrick says. Even to himself, he sounds strained. “It’s always fun to hear it from someone else’s perspective. MFEO, babe, am I right?”

“Mmph,” says Pete, the tips of his ears turning pink.

“And they didn’t tell you about their wedding?” Brendon asks. “That’s a shame.”

Patrick’s got the feeling Brendon’s onto them. He’s not exactly subtle about it. It figures—a degree in investigative journalism from UCLA has prepared him for governmental subterfuge and Patrick can barely keep from telling Pete what he’s bought him for any given birthday. They both would make terrible spies. 

Andy’s brow furrows delicately. Before he can open his mouth to speak, Pete speaks for him. “Andy’s been on a research base in the Arctic Archipelago for the last two years. Communications aren’t exactly reliable. We got married at the courthouse with a couple of witnesses, it was hardly worth asking him to fly in. The wedding is a very small part of our marriage—it doesn’t define our relationship.”

“Interesting,” Brendon says, taking a sip of tea and looking at Patrick. He says it with meaning. He says it to rhyme with “bullshit”.

Patrick smiles back beatifically and clinks his cup back into its saucer. “Yeah. Don’t be so heteronormative, Bren.”

“Only,” Brendon goes on, “only, I thought you said the two of you have been married for  _ three  _ years?”

Jesus Christ, what even  _ is  _ Brendon Urie? The fucking  _ Columbo _ of gay marriage? 

_ “Three?”  _ Andy frowns. “No, I don’t think so...”

“Dating,” Pete says shrilly. “We were dating for a year, and then we got married.”

“You were dating and you didn’t tell me?” Andy says, looking hurt. 

“You were  _ dating  _ and you didn’t tell  _ Andy?”  _ Brendon says. “Come on, guys. Dick move.”

Santa suit, holly berry, reindeer nose: these are the violent shades of red Patrick is turning. “It was—Very new. We didn’t want to tell everyone in case it didn’t work out.” 

Andy starts shaking his head, a development Patrick finds reassuring  _ not at all.  _ “No,” he says. “No, you definitely did not, because I remember you said—”

Whatever happens, Andy  _ is not allowed  _ to repeat anything Patrick may or may not have said when he was drunk and pining. It’s really fucking important that Andy doesn’t share whatever he’s about to say with the group when the group contains Pete. This is getting entirely too close for comfort. Patrick acts on instinct and base human fear. 

“Oh!” Patrick says. And he hurls the tepid contents of his cup across the table and into Brendon’s lap. 

“What the  _ fuck?”  _

“Are you okay? Is it hot? Do you need ice?”

“Don’t get ice from the freezer, for god’s sake! Do you have  _ any _ idea what refrigerant is doing to the ozone? We are literally surrounded by  _ snow,  _ use  _ that!” _

In the midst of all this, Patrick sits with his head in his hands. He is lying to so many people: Brendon, Andy, Pete, himself. He is going to cross his stories, his wires, trip himself up. He engages in meditative deep breathing. He imagines a whole Crayola box of calm blue oceans. 

“How silly of me,” Patrick says—shouts, really, to make himself heard over the din. “Brendon, why don’t you go get changed out of those wet clothes. Andy, if you wanted to drop the Eric Larson thing you’ve got going on, some of Pete’s stuff might fit you, help yourself.” 

When they’ve disappeared upstairs, Pete gives Patrick a look. It’s the look everyone’s been giving him since the production crew arrived. It’s a look that says  _ I can’t believe you think anyone would believe this, God, as if I’d marry someone like you—Me, an attractive, bisexual lawyer with unlimited options on both sides of the sexuality spectrum.  _ That’s how Patrick interprets the look. 

“I can’t believe you threw a cup of tea over your boss,” Pete says, starting to laugh. 

Patrick’s in no mood for laughter. There’s a possibility the trauma of this morning has broken him, left him adversely conditioned. Patrick, honestly, might never laugh again. 

“We have to tell Andy,” Patrick says urgently. “You have to go upstairs and tell him right now.”

A pause. Confused. 

“Why?” Pete asks. 

Another pause. Incredulous, this time. “What do you mean,  _ why?  _ Isn’t it obvious?”

“Not really, no,” Pete shrugs. 

“But…” Patrick says. “But Andy doesn’t know about the lie. He doesn’t know the details. He keeps, like,  _ saying _ things he should not. I might die. Is that your plan? Are you trying to kill me?”

“You’ll never prove it in court,” Pete says brightly. Fondly, he adds, “Idiot. Don’t you get it? Andy’s buying it. He’s known us all this time and he’s  _ buying it. _ If we can fool Andy, we can fool anyone.”

Patrick is losing track of who they’re lying to and what they’ve said. The story Andy believes doesn’t match with what Patrick told Brendon and the rest of the staff at the studio. Possibly, he can pass it off as early-relationship enthusiasm on his part. More to the point, though, why  _ does _ Andy believe they’re married? Is Patrick that desperate, lonely, obvious? His vision whites out with mortification for a second and, as the room crackles back into view, he realises Pete is still talking. 

“It’s only going to get more complicated if Andy knows. So we just roll with it, okay?”

Patrick smiles, big, wide, false. “Yeah, no. You’re right. We’re totally nailing this.”

Then he turns away and forces himself not to feel disappointed, like some kind of friend-zoned high school loser. So, Pete doesn’t love him. Go figure. Pete hasn’t loved him for ten years. It’s not new information and Patrick’s not going to cry about it. He didn’t put his whole career on the line to blow everything over his  _ feelings _ . 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> How far would you go to protect your fake marriage secret? If it includes throwing a cup of tea at your boss, congratulations! Please step up and accept your Romantic Idiocy Award!


	14. Chapter 14

“So, a little bit of mod podge, and there you have it. That bow’s not going anywhere, people. Wreaths, giftwrap, kids’ hair accessories. Once you’ve nailed the basics of the bow, you can have a lot of fun with it.”

“Mod… podge?” Pete says, carefully, turning the bottle over in his hands. 

Patrick gives him a look. “Yes. Mod podge. It’s short for modelling… podge.”

“Ah, yes,” Pete says. “The well-known podge element.”

“Exactly,” Patrick says, beaming. “Earth, wind, water, fire, and… podge.”

“Does that make you… the last podgebender?”

“Your jokes are awful. Like, you get that I didn’t marry you for your jokes, right?”

“I know. You married me because I have a huge—”

“Family show, Pete! Family show!”

“—salary, that funds your mod podge habit.” Pete blinks innocently. Patrick’s not falling for it for a second. “What? What did you think I was going to say?” 

Brendon’s preoccupied, frowning at his phone, presumably texting his soon-to-be-ex-husband and feeling miserable about it. Patrick picks up the missed cue. “Well, that’s all for today. Thank you so much for tuning in. We’ll see you next time, and remember—home is where the heart is.”

Patrick presses into Pete’s side, the solid warmth of Pete’s body snugged up against his. The lights dim and screens around the world cut to the WtHI logo. 

“Oh. Wait—is that? Yes. That’s a wrap,” Brendon declares. “Good job, everyone.”

“Are we still on for tonight?” Pete asks casually. 

There’s a lot of directions that sentence could go.  _ Tonight, we’re filing backdated taxes. Tonight, I thought you might like to see this thing I can do with my tongue. Tonight, I’m ripping your still-beating heart from your chest by telling Brendon that I’d wouldn’t marry someone like you if my inheritance depended on it.  _

Patrick suspects the first, hopes for the second, fears the third. 

“Tonight?” Patrick repeats, stupidly. 

Pete looks at him strangely. “Yes,” he says. “We have a date. Remember?”

“Oh, I’m allowed to know about  _ this  _ date, am I?” Andy asks, scooping vegan yoghurt into his mouth with what is best described as malice. He’s Patrick’s least favourite person in the world right now.

“You,” Patrick says, pointing at Andy, “will be quiet. From now on.” To Pete, he says, “No. I don’t remember”

“With Brontë?” Pete prompts, rolling his eyes. “We’re taking her to see Santa?”

That’s disappointing. Patrick doesn’t  _ mean  _ to feel disappointed, but he does. He adores hanging out with Brontë and Pete and he definitely doesn’t think of taking her to see Santa as a disappointment, but. Yeah. Patrick’s disappointed. Devastated, even. He ducks his head for a second, fussing with the fastening of his shoe, and while he’s down there he schools his face into a look of joyful anticipation. 

“Yes! Santa!” he shrieks. Pete looks alarmed, so Patrick dials it back to a seven and tries again. “Totally forgot, but that sounds awesome.”

Just as they’re leaving the house, Andy says, “Hey. Do you mind if I stay for a couple days? I have somewhere lined up but I can’t move in until Friday.”

Patrick feels his life shorten considerably. He imagined the time he had to keep Andy and Brendon apart would be measured in hours, not  _ days.  _ “I mean…”

“Sure,” Pete says, reaching for his car keys. “You can take Brontë’s room. She’ll bunk in with me. I mean, us. Me and my husband. No big deal, right, Patrick?”

“No big deal,” Patrick parrots darkly. 

*

“I don’t understand why I’m here, that’s all,” Patrick says. He says it very quietly, so Brontë doesn’t hear. His desire to be elsewhere is a Pete thing and he doesn’t want to hurt her feelings. Most of Patrick’s problems at the moment are Pete things. Pete is ruining his life by being the best person in it. Patrick’s life is a complicated mess right now.

“Don’t you think it would be weird,” Pete says, knocking on his blinker and pulling into the parking lot, “if I took  _ our daughter _ to see Santa Claus without you. That would be weird, right?”

Patrick looks in the rear-view mirror. Last time Patrick checked, Brontë was not his legal responsibility, and neither was her father. There is no ‘our’. Patrick loves these Wentzes because he  _ wants  _ to, not because he signed paperwork or made a verbal contract. Brontë grins at him and gives him a double thumbs up. Maybe. It’s hard to tell under the mittens. She’s crazy cute, either way. Patrick grins back.

“She’s not  _ our  _ daughter,” Patrick points out, quieter than before. “She’s  _ your  _ daughter. I’m just the weird third wheel you indulge so I don’t start collecting house cats.”

Pete doesn’t answer until he’s found a spot and pulled into it and switched off the ignition and unclipped his seatbelt and turned in his seat and looked at Patrick with his lips pursed. He holds up a finger. Patrick is struck by the welcome image of Pete in court, all fiery and sexy and shouting out objections, a thing he’s sure lawyers do all the time. Patrick doesn’t really know what Pete’s job entails but he’s watched a lot of Suits. 

“Okay, first of all, you know that’s bullshit, right?” Pete says. “You know we like spending time with you, don’t you? Like, these fun family activities are less fun, and less family, if you’re not along for the ride? A third wheel’s not unnecessary if it’s fastened to a tricycle.”

“That’s technically true,” Patrick says. “But—"

“Patrick, she’s  _ three,” _ Pete goes on. “She doesn’t understand biology or genetics or how fucking sad it is that she’s never had to learn the word  _ mommy. _ She just knows you’re her other parent in every way that means something to her. There’s more to this whole parenting thing than ejaculation,  _ Sticky.” _

“You’re the  _ best _ Sticky,” Brontë says from the back seat.  _ “My _ Sticky.”

That settles in Patrick’s chest, the words taking root and wrapping around his heart. Patrick looks at Pete, searching his face for any trace of insincerity. He finds none. “Oh,” he says.

“Which brings me to my second point,” Pete says, holding up another finger, “don’t you think Brendon would be a teensy bit suspicious if I took Brontë to see Santa and you, her other father, stayed home?”

“Brendon’s suspicious anyway,” Patrick points out. “And we’ve left him with  _ Andy,  _ so, like, we’re probably outed by now.”

“It’ll be fine,” Pete says, like a man whose career isn’t riding on this. 

“I’m just saying, I’m concerned. Brendon thinks something’s up.”

“Because you’re way too hot to marry someone like me,” Pete says easily, squeezing Patrick’s knee. Patrick goes deaf. The ringing he can hear is either a stroke or steam, pouring from his ears. If Pete notices, he doesn’t react. “Okay, kiddo,” he says to Brontë. “Let’s go meet Santa.”

“Yay! Santa!”

The Christmas village is beautiful. There are twinkle lights and elves and a hot chocolate cafe and Brontë is enchanted. Patrick can’t stop watching the two of them together. His heart aches with the tenderness of loss—ridiculous, really, since he hasn’t  _ lost  _ anything. 

Worst, or best, of all, Pete insists on carrying on their fake husband chicanery, even here, where no one can see them. They hold hands, they share a cocoa, Pete pecks his chocolate and peppermint lips against Patrick’s under the sprigs of mistletoe hung from every lamppost, doorway, and holiday garland.

“What are you doing?” Patrick hisses, when Pete kisses him again. This time, Patrick turns his head and Pete’s lips land on the side of his nose. “Knock it off! That’s not even mistletoe, it’s holly. And no one here knows who we are. This is unnecessary husbanding.”

“You’re an international television star now,” Pete says, taking Patrick’s hand and tucking both into his pocket. It’s actually really hard to carry a three year old, on ice, with one hand hobbled in someone else’s coat. “They mentioned you in the Tribune. You could be recognised literally  _ anywhere.  _ What if there’s paps behind the merry go round? Do you want to be outed in tomorrow’s Gawker?”

“Shut up,” Patrick whines.

“No. I’ve gone method, I’m living the matrimonial lifestyle. Is it believable? Are you buying it?”

Pete kisses him again. If they were married—and Patrick’s struggling to remember they are  _ not— _ this would constitute intolerable cruelty and Patrick could file for divorce.

“I think it’s believable, yes,” he says. It’s meant to be snippy but it comes out heartsick. Patrick stares at their clasped hands and elects not to say anything else. 

On the drive home, Pete holds Patrick’s hand across the gear shift, their fingers knitted together, Pete’s thumb tracing slow, swooping lines over Patrick’s knuckles. The street lights race by. Brontë sleeps in the back of the car. Patrick curls his thawing fingers a little more tightly around Pete’s. Here, in this car, is everything he’s ever wanted. 

Not done sabotaging himself, Patrick nods to their hands and says, “No one’s watching now.” 

Pete squeezes gently. “Hmm?”

“I mean, it seems like we probably don’t have to hold hands,” Patrick says, making no attempt to reclaim his own fingers. “No Brendon. No cameras. No, uh, no pap.”

Pete glances at Patrick, his side-eye rivaling Brontë’s. “Method,” he says. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Method. Like Marlon Brando. Nothing more, obviously. (Thank you, thank you, _thank you_ so much for reading along. You guys are making it Christmas every day for me!)


	15. Chapter 15

The third day of their fake marriage, and Patrick’s in the basement with Pete. Brontë is off in the woods with Andy, foraging for mushrooms or checking moss growth or looking for Sasquatch. The important thing is that Andy is nowhere near Brendon, preventing the possibility of note comparison on the fussy details of Patrick’s marriage. Pete is supposed to be helping with gift-wrapping but “helping” is a generous term for what Pete’s doing. What Pete is doing is sitting with his phone, looking at funny cat videos while Patrick does the hard work. 

“You could help,” Patrick says.

Pete sticks out the shiny pink of his tongue and waggles his eyebrows. “I am helping. I’m helping by showing you hilarious kitty cats. Look at this. This one’s fucking brilliant, I swear.”

Pete is annoying. He keeps trying to show Patrick the funny cat videos, which seems to involve him basically climbing into Patrick’s lap and shoving the phone in his face. Patrick keeps pushing him away and Pete tells Patrick he has no sense of humour in a way that implies Patrick spends his days kicking kittens instead of refusing to watch videos of them. Patrick hasn’t taped Pete’s mouth shut or mod-podged his fingers to his phone’s lock button but, God, it’s a close-run thing. Patrick cuts gift wrap with snippy intent, glaring at Pete as the blades swoosh through the paper. 

Patrick has wanted a lot of men in his life. His relationship history is more hall of shame than fame. He’s wanted them, and he’s fucked them, and then he doesn’t want them anymore. It’s like a thirst that burns his throat and once he’s slaked it by drinking deep and plentiful, he forgets how it felt to be thirsty. But Patrick wants Pete in a different way. He wants him in the happily-ever-after way. In the grow-old-together way. When Pete calls him “my husband” Patrick aches with the easy familiarity of it.  _ My husband, my daughter, my family.  _

Despite everything, Patrick’s having a hard time separating the fact from the fiction. What did Joe call it—the difference between real love and love on TV? It’s becoming less likely that Patrick will sit Pete down and confess his feelings and far, far more likely that Patrick will do something ridiculous, like forgetting to leave. 

Whatever to that. Patrick’s not thinking about it. Instead, he pulls another box of gifts across the floor. He rummages, elbow deep in games and crafting materials when his fingers brush something smooth and solid and wrapped in thin tissue paper. “What’s this?”

Pete goes rigid with full-body horror. “Not that one,” he shrieks, hurling himself across the floor and landing on top of the box like it’s a live grenade. “You can’t touch that one!”

And that’s how Patrick figures out Pete has bought him a gift.

*

Of course, Patrick calls Joe.

“The thing is, we don’t buy one another gifts,” he says, when Joe answers. He’s pacing the bedroom floor, wearing stress circles into the antique rug. His phone is jammed between his shoulder and his ear. He sweats all over the earpiece. Normal people do not sweat from the ears, but normal people are not fake-married to Pete Wentz, so, whatever. Patrick’s life is not fucking normal. It’s so fucking stressful. 

“What?” says Joe, exasperated. Like the first dog launched into space, he doesn’t appreciate the gravity of the situation. “Who doesn’t buy one another gifts?”

“We don’t,” Patrick says. “We’ve never bought gifts, but now there’s a gift and it’s awkward, because I didn’t buy a gift. I didn’t know gifts were a thing I had to worry about.”

“We, as in, you and me? Do we buy each other gifts? Do you—are you asking me to buy you a gift?”

“I don’t know what to do with this. It’s not normal.”

“What—calling your friend to yell at him about gifts? No, not really.”

Patrick has no idea why he called Joe Trohman when he could’ve gone and found Andy. He opens his mouth to tell Joe so, but Joe, crabbier than an Alaskan fishing vessel, cuts him off. “Are we talking about Pete? Did Pete get you a gift? Is the gift his penis? Because, honestly, I don’t think you’re gonna have any trouble figuring out what to do with  _ that.” _

“He bought me a whole entire gift,” Patrick says again. His voice doesn’t sound like his own, like an echo. “A nice one, too.”

Joe takes pause. Patrick crosses the room and sits on the edge of the bed, grateful that Pete is bathing Brontë and he has the room to himself. The house is so crowded with people right now, mental breakdown space is at a premium.

“What do I  _ do?” _ Patrick asks, his voice small. 

“Okay, is it me?” Joe asks. “Am I having a fucking  _ stroke? _ What’s the significance of the gift, Patrick?”

“Well, I don’t know what the gift is, exactly,” Patrick says. “But I know it’s important! It’s wrapped in tissue paper and everyone knows on the scale of gift significance, tissue paper means it’s a biggie.”

Joe takes a big, bastardy breath of disbelief. “You  _ don’t know _ what it is? So, you could be getting this worked up over an Ax gift set? You’re catastrophising again.  _ Patastrophising. _ We’ve talked about this.”

Patrick looks at his own incredulous, shiny face in the mirror above the bureau. “Well,  _ d’uh,”  _ he hisses. “He’s bought me a gift, Joe. We haven’t exchanged gifts since before Brontë was born—”

“Fuck, the two of you are so  _ married. _ Like, you understand that that’s the kind of thing my parents say, right?”

“Fuck  _ you,  _ we wanted to focus on Brontë!” Patrick hisses, sounding married even to himself. “This is a big deal and you’re not helping.”

Joe makes a sound like he’s going to say something terrible, but before he can, the bathroom door clicks and Patrick is no longer alone in the room. 

“Okay, but did we learn why we can’t  _ eat _ the apple shampoo?” Pete says, a squirmy Brontë on his hip and bubbles in his hair. “No matter how good it smells?”

“Shit,” Patrick swears. He slaps at the screen and, in a blind and fearful panic, shoves his phone down the front of his pants. “Pete, hi!”

Patrick hopes his thumb killed the call. He hopes Joe’s not on the line right now, listening to the fleshy sound of Patrick’s junk. The bounds of their friendship are long-reaching and flexible, but Patrick’s not sure it will withstand the knowledge of the noise of penis tip against mouthpiece. Patrick’s pulse holds horrors. 

Pete stands in the door, Brontë on his hip. He frowns at Patrick. “Is everything okay?”

“Fine,” Patrick says, shrill enough to alert the dolphins all the way over in the Shedd. 

“Were you talking to someone? We can leave, if you need some privacy.”

Patrick laughs at that. The notion of privacy in this house! Pete doesn’t laugh with him, though, so he blusters. “No, no, no one was talking to anyone. Especially not me!”

“You were talking to someone,” Pete says, setting Brontë on the bed and striding back into the bathroom. “Let me rephrase: I heard you talking. So you were talking to yourself, or you were talking to someone else. You’re allowed to talk to people, you don’t have to lie about it. Who you talk to is, like, absolutely none of my business.”

“No, you’re right. I was talking to my mom,” Patrick lies, giving chase. 

“Your mom, right.” Pete begins mopping bathtime overspill with a hand towel. “Well, if you need us to leave so you can talk to your  _ mom…” _

Patrick drops to his knees and rescues a rubber duck from under the toilet. “It’s cool, I can call her back later.”

“Are you sure? I’d hate to think being here was some kind of...  _ inconvenience  _ for you.”

Patrick frowns. “Why are you being such a d-i-c-k?”

“I’m not being a d-i-c-k. I’m just saying, if you can’t wait until Friday to make calls to your f-u-c-k buddies, then B and I will stay out of your way.”

“That’s not what was happening.”

“No? I mean, you’ve got previous.”

Patrick looks at Pete, unsure of where this is going. He is filled with sudden and violent ill-feeling. “Are you—s-l-u-t shaming me right now? Is that what’s happening?”

“If the shoe fits,” Pete says. He’s wincing very visibly, like, his whole upper body is in on it, his shoulders up by his ears, his hands in blocky fists. 

“Oh, go f-u-c-k yourself, a-s-s-h-o-l-e,” Patrick hisses. If Big Bird were dead, he’d be rolling over in his grave. 

They sit in tense silence, as unhappy as one another. Patrick’s breathing is ragged with hurt. He’s gone from excited-with to annoyed-by Pete so fast it’s given him emotional whiplash. Usually, when someone is angry with him, there’s an obvious reason why. Patrick has said the wrong thing, done the wrong thing, done the wrong person. Whatever it is, there’s a thing and he can feel  _ sorry _ about it _.  _ Now, though? Pissy and irritated and without an obvious explanation for his clear wrongdoing, with his sadness at the sudden change turning his blood to gravel? Patrick has nothing to do but sulk.

“Lighten up, it’s not like you’re my actual husband,” Patrick’s big, dumb mouth says, with no permission from his brain. 

Pete jerks back, recoiling like Patrick slapped him. His eyes and mouth glitter, as cold as Chicago snow. “Right,” he says, climbing to his feet. “Cool.”

“Pete,” Patrick says, to the back of Pete’s Metallica t-shirt. “Come on… I didn’t...” 

And here, Patrick realises he has no idea how to end that sentence. 

He didn’t, what? Didn’t mean it? He did, because Pete’s  _ not  _ his boyfriend is he? On Friday, the crew will pack up and Pete will take Brontë to his parents’ house for the holidays and Patrick will go back to his empty apartment and his Lean Cuisines for one and his emotional support Grindr. He watches Pete leave the room and he sits with his knees pulled to his chest, his pulse throbbing in his ears. 

“Oh, God. That was awful. Why would you make me listen to that?” says Joe’s voice from Patrick’s crotch. “Does it help if I tell you he’s so into you it’s actually painful for me to think about it? Your star-crossed lovers bullshit is giving me headaches.”

Patrick fishes his phone from his underpants. Somehow, this is not the most humiliating thing to happen to him in the past week. “Shut up, you’re a bad friend and I don’t like you,” he hisses into the receiver. Then he kills the call and sits in the dark and feels horrible.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Day 15, everyone! Give it up for day 15! (Have I been waiting for over two weeks to use that? You’ll never prove it. I know a good lawyer.)


	16. Chapter 16

Thursday, and Patrick’s lurking in the pantry, browsing the internet for last-minute gifts. 

What he ought to be doing is preparing to record the second-to-last segment of studio-crafted Christmas cheer. Instead, he’s finding reasons of increasing importance to be in whichever room Pete is not. It feels like the only reason Earth isn’t spinning wildly off its axis is because Patrick is carefully making sure that their paths don’t cross. He’s hurt. He’s worried that hurt people say hurtful things. He doesn’t want to make things worse.

He’s not  _ hiding,  _ exactly _.  _ Hiding feels like an admission of guilt and Patrick’s not ready to assume that level of responsibility for whatever the hell happened last night. He doesn’t need to have a conversation about  _ that  _ conversation—he’s spent enough time kicking himself over it, there will be no winners if he invites Pete to join in. 

He hasn’t apologised yet. He’s trying to figure out if he needs to.

Gifts, then. This is the perfect time to shop for gifts. It turns out, the only thing harder than shopping for Pete, is shopping for Pete when Patrick wants to push him face-first into a snow drift. This is why he’s turned to the clinical, personality-free interface of Amazon. Pete can receive Bezos’ finest and count himself lucky that Patrick doesn’t give him a wet willy to go with it.

Patrick sighs. It’s not that he doesn’t know what Pete might like. It’s the opposite. Patrick has  _ too many _ ideas, every one of them personal in a very specific way. There’s a fine line between corporate and stalker; Cufflinks, for example? Boring. But cufflinks engraved with your crush’s favourite book quote? Desperate, obvious, a terrifying moment of brutal truth. So: Amazon. Same-day delivery of DVD box sets, no side order of feelings.

Except,  _ everything _ renders significant when Patrick thinks about it long enough. If he buys cologne, he’s admitting he knows which cologne Pete likes, therefore admitting he’s  _ sniffed  _ Pete. Clothes are out. He might as well hang a sign around his neck that reads  _ SOMETIMES, I PICTURE YOU NAKED. _ The digitally remastered director’s cut of 1993’s perennial showstopper, Super Mario Brothers? Yeah, no. Why not buy Pete a wedding ring— _ another  _ wedding ring, a  _ real _ wedding ring—and make it official?

Someone slides open the door and lets a shaft of bright winter sunlight slant into the pantry. It’s Pete, a succubus, drawn to human suffering, apparently. “Oh,” he says. “You’re hiding in the pantry? Of course you are.”

“I thought it was the one place no one would look for me,” Patrick says. He gives Pete a significant once-over. “I should’ve known you’d be the exception. Anyway, I’m not hiding. I’m… hanging out. By myself.”

“Yeah,” Pete says. “You and your phone. What’re you…”

They both look at Patrick’s phone, lit up with an unfortunately timed Grindr notification. Patrick shoves it behind his back. “I was, uh,” he scrambles. “It’s not what you’re thinking.”

“What would I think? We’re not  _ actually _ married. What—or who—you do is none of my business.” Pete’s voice is light, carbonated with playful disinterest. His eyes are so sad, though. It makes Patrick’s heart lurch hard to the left, as if the only way out of this mess is spontaneous catastrophic chest injury. 

“Fuck. I wasn’t looking at Grindr, okay?”

“I don’t care.”

“I care, though!” When he laughs, it sounds dissociated from the rest of him. “Jeez, it’d be nice if you’d let me focus on one completely unrealistic relationship before I start another!” 

“It feels pretty fucking realistic to me,” Pete says, to the juice cartons on the shelf. When he meets Patrick’s eyes again, he looks broken. Patrick cannot for the life of him work out what he keeps doing to break Pete. 

“What do you mean?” Patrick asks. 

“Nothing. Whatever. I’m happy for you, seriously,” Pete says. “I hope this one treats you right. Like, you deserve someone who treats you right—You do  _ know _ that, don’t you?” 

A normal person would admit they were shopping for Christmas gifts and leave it at that. Patrick is not a normal person, by definition of any dictionary in any written language. Patrick is a disaster, in fact, a terrible car wreck of rash decisions, smashing into a wall of self-loathing. This is the only logical explanation for why he opens his mouth and says, “Pretending I’m your husband is the worst thing I’ve ever done to you. I’ll give you some space, when the crew leaves, you know? I’ll back off, I’ll give you and B the room you need to be a family and you can, like, find her a  _ mom _ or something. I never should’ve asked you to do this for me, it’s too much. I’m so sorry.”

Pete steps inside fully and closes the door. Toe-toe in the pantry, they eye one another under the swinging lightbulb. They’ve got to stop running into one another like this. 

“Is that what  _ you  _ want?” Pete asks. “Like, really, truly? Is that what your heart’s telling you?”

And, no. No, of course that’s not what Patrick wants, Patrick wants Pete. But what Patrick wants rarely aligns with what he’s offered and this time, this not-relationship, is no exception. Instead of lying, Patrick avoids the question. “I have  _ never _ had a serious conversation with my heart. You know me, right? It’s too hard to hear  _ that  _ guy over my dick.”

Pete winces. “I didn’t mean it like that. You  _ know _ I didn’t mean it like that.”

“Whatever,” says Patrick, smiling hollow and broken. “It’s no big deal. One more day, and then it’s back to our regularly scheduled programming.”

“It  _ is _ a big deal,” Pete insists. He buries one hand in his hair and yanks, like he’s trying to pull out his thoughts to show them to Patrick, like he can’t untangle the web of veins and nerves and  _ feelings _ twisting between heart and tongue. Patrick relates. He doesn’t want to, but he does.

“What do _you_ want, Pete? Really? Truly?” Patrick says. 

Patrick stands in front of Pete, tender with feeling, raw with hope. His whole heartbeat pulses violent at the back of his throat. If he opens his mouth again, there’s a fifty-fifty chance he’ll barf instead of talk.

Pete opens his mouth and Patrick knows with the immediate clarity of hindsight that he does not want to hear whatever Pete’s about to say. Like Pandora’s box, whatever spills out will not tolerate being forced back inside. 

This is a dangerous situation. Patrick doesn’t want to know. He can’t bear not to. 

Patrick closes his eyes and attempts damage limitation. “Pete, listen. I—”

Instead of talking, Pete leans forward and uses his mouth for something else. Pete cups his big hands to Patrick’s face and  _ kisses  _ him, firm and meaningful and on the mouth. It doesn’t feel like a first kiss, or, at least, Patrick doesn’t experience it as one. He kisses Pete with muscle memory he doesn’t have. It’s tender, sweet, gentler than Patrick’s ever imagined it might be. Pete kisses Patrick with intent, with their bodies pressed flush. It feels good. It feels deliberate. It feels… right. 

The kiss breaks. Patrick is bereft, gasping into the tiny space between their mouths and Pete’s hands are still firm and sure on his face and Patrick’s looking into Pete’s endless amber eyes and Patrick wants, Patrick wants, Patrick wants. They’re still in the pantry with the door closed. There are no cameras. So, who are they performing for? For once, Patrick isn’t writing an elaborate fairytale in which he loves his best friend with every beat of his misfiring heart. Patrick—

Patrick  _ loves his best friend.  _ This  _ is _ his fairytale. This is his prince. 

“Patrick,” Pete murmurs, resting his forehead against Patrick’s. He says it like the only anchor in a world that, due to a sudden catastrophic meteorological event, lacks gravity. He says it like the first time he’s said Patrick’s name and understood the meaning of it. He says it like he’s sharing a secret with the only person who understands the significance. “Fuck, Patrick,” Pete whispers again, eyes shining eerie in the dim light. “You don’t… I want...”

With speed, and without thinking about the consequences whatsoever, Patrick kisses Pete again. He takes two fistfuls of Pete’s hair and crushes Pete’s mouth to his. They kiss with their hands in one another’s hair, teeth pulling, grasping, biting at one another’s mouths, half-laughing, half-moaning, kissing like they can consume one another. Patrick parts Pete’s teeth with his eager tongue and lets Pete lick the need from the roof of his mouth. If their first kiss ended on a question mark, this one is the answer. They kiss with ten years of unsatisfied hunger. 

Patrick kisses Pete until the kiss ends. 


	17. Chapter 17

Patrick agrees to meet his definitely-fake husband, possibly-real boyfriend in the courtyard of the Ivy Room at 8 sharp. The specifics of their relationship remain undiscussed. Not that Patrick didn’t want to discuss them, he’s never wanted to discuss anything more in his life, but with crew and cameras and Brendon and Andy? Opportunities for alone time were thin on the ground. 

While Pete showered and changed and lectured Andy on the importance of a structured night-time routine, Patrick slipped away in an Uber. He needed to change, he rationalised, even though he knew Pete could lend him something. He needed to stand under his own shower and think about kissing Pete and defy himself not to get off on it. He needed some distance. He needed to make an entrance. 

At 8:47, Patrick falls out of an Uber on East Ohio. Sweating like a barn animal and almost an hour late—How’s that for an entrance? 

The venue is gorgeous and intimidating. It’s a huge red brick building. Fairy lights twist through every square inch of winter-bare flora. Patrick wants to have a long discussion with the designer almost as much as he wants to collapse with a stress-induced asthma attack. It’s like walking into a glittering ice palace from a fairytale, or the sparkly guts of a shooting star. Patrick doesn’t know if he should feel spellbound or terrified. He touches a glowing stalactite with a single fingertip and allows himself to feel both.

Pete’s waiting under one of the ornamental lamp posts, phone in hand. Tonight, he’s gone all out in a fitted black tux, white shirt, black bow tie. Snowflakes dust the shoulders of his jacket and melt into his hair, his bowtie quirking to one side like a forties Hollywood rake. He looks beautiful, irresistible, impossible, fuckable—a movie star who just got debauched in the bathroom. He’s like the sun; Patrick has trouble looking at him straight-on. 

Patrick walks through the canopy of lights, then stops, six feet away, unsure in a way he never is around Pete. God, he came here to drink free champagne and dance the Cha Cha Slide. It feels like somewhere, he took a wrong turn and wandered onto the travelling set of Love, Actually.

“Um, hey?” he says. “I’m supposed to meet this super cute single dad for his office Christmas party—Have you seen him anywhere? He’s around your height but, like, I don’t remember seeing him in a tie since his first day at the office.”

Because, jokes, Patrick thinks. Jokes will make the awkward trickle of sexual tension disappear. 

“Funny,” Pete says, still distracted. He glances at Patrick from the corner of his eye, back at his phone, then pulls a dramatic double-take. “I—Oh.”

Pete’s whole body jolts toward Patrick, like the invisible thread that binds them runs both ways. Pete drinks him in, from the toes of his shoes to the feathery over-the-brow swoosh of his hair. He seems to be having trouble swallowing. The sexual tension manifests as a river. A flood. A tsunami of inappropriate dick thoughts. Patrick’s thinking about Pete’s bow tie slack against his tattooed, winter-pale throat, his shirt tails untucked. Patrick’s thinking about kneeling on the marble floor, gathering dust on his well-pressed pants and stains on his shirt collar, Pete’s dick deep in his throat. Patrick’s thinking all the things he has deliberately never allowed himself to think about Pete.

“You…” Pete starts, then stops. He takes a deep breath and starts again. “You look—Jesus, Patrick.” 

After six horrendous costume changes, Patrick settled on slim black pants, black shirt, black silk blazer. The jacket has the faintest sheen, glowing with the lustre of pearl dust under the lights. It's ostentatious, eye-catching, makes him feel like Harry fucking Styles. His shoes are dark grey suede and his favourite things in the world. The fedora might be defined as  _ too much.  _ He hoped the pink of his lips would pop against the monochrome. Now, though, his lips aren’t the only part of him that flush rosy. Now, with Pete’s eyes raking over him—hot as hearts beating, as hips meeting—the only thing that’s too much is the number of layers between them. 

Patrick places one hand carefully on each of Pete’s shoulders. Pete holds his gaze and licks his lips in a gesture Patrick refuses to interpret. “You look so handsome,” Patrick murmurs, aiming for sexy. “Sorry I’m late.”

He leans in to peck the freshly-trimmed scruff of Pete’s cheek. Instead, Pete turns his head and catches Patrick’s mouth in a kiss. “Patrick Stump,” Pete says, his smile pressed to Patrick’s. “You’re worth the wait.”

Patrick opens his mouth, in all likelihood to tell Pete to fuck off, like he would’ve done a week ago. A week ago, Patrick still believed he didn’t love Pete Wentz. A week ago, Patrick didn’t realise why writing those articles, presenting those features, saying “my husband, Pete,” felt so natural. A week ago, Pete hadn’t kissed him breathless against the pantry shelves and twisted Patrick’s world upside down. What Patrick’s saying is, things happen in a week. Patrick closes his mouth and takes the chivalrous elbow Pete offers him and walks through the front door. 

If Patrick was blown away by the courtyard, he’s not prepared for the ballroom. Evergreen garland drips from every available surface like the bowels of a faerie court. There are so many twinkling lights that the chandeliers are unnecessary. There’s a Christmas tree the height of Pete’s house, a live band, circling waiters in bow ties, enough holly and ivy and mistletoe to represent deforestation. 

Patrick looks around and starts to sweat. Everyone here holds a licence to practice law in the state of Illinois and Patrick holds—well, he holds a hot glue gun, most weekdays. He cannot charm these people. The only person he knows is Mr. Wentz and he only likes him because Patrick stops his son from jamming forks in the outlets. “This is a bad idea…”

“Whatever,  _ hubby,”  _ Pete says, tugging Patrick across the dancefloor, “ready to impress my colleagues?”

Patrick makes a sound of intense human suffering and allows Pete to tow him into the fray. 

Against the advice of any qualified therapist, Patrick replaces his social anxiety with gallons of champagne. Patrick drinks to impress, to excess, downing glass after glass of delicious golden bubbles. Patrick drinks to forget his problems, or else; to forget about the new ones he’s creating. Patrick swallows down champagne and rests his hand on Pete’s ass and smiles at the endless carousel of middle-aged, middle-class, middle-minded lawyers he is paraded in front of. He pretends, for Pete’s sake, that he’s having fun. Everyone Pete works with is an order of magnitude less interesting than the possibility of getting Pete alone and naked. Filled with champagne, and very aware of Brendon lurking somewhere in the room, Patrick attempts to invoke an out-of-body experience.

Just as well it works, because somehow they’ve convinced Pete Sr. 

“I can’t say I’m shocked,” he’s saying again, to Pete, eyeing the matching wedding rings they both forgot to remove. 

_ Patrick  _ is shocked. Patrick can’t believe how many people  _ believe _ the ridiculous sham of their fake marriage. 

“It happened so fast. One minute we’re pretending we’re just friends, the next we’re admitting we’ve fallen in love,” Pete’s saying, hand to his chest. Pete really is an incredible actor.

Pete’s dad looks annoyed. “You weren’t  _ married _ to Patrick when you came over last weekend. This seems like something you might’ve mentioned to us—your mother, at least. Patrick, do you have anything to say about this?”

Patrick looks Pete’s dad in the eye. “Um, I… er… we sort of… uh…” 

“I’m sorry we didn’t tell you, it’s just very new,” Pete lies smoothly. He is so much smoother in deception than Patrick. Look at him, lying to his dad’s face without turning a hair. Pete’s here, lying like a pro, and Patrick can’t remember what normal human beings do with their mouths when they’re not talking. “The wedding wasn’t even a wedding, really,” Pete goes on. “We went to the courthouse, signed some paperwork, all done in thirty minutes.”

“Even so…”

“Look, if anything happens to me, I want Patrick to take care of Brontë. Marrying him guarantees him the house, my life insurance, a couple of financial things. Yes, I love him very much but, no, we’re not invested in the notion of marriage. I’ve always said, if I could marry any guy, it’d be  _ this _ guy, but, like,  _ beyond _ the heterosexual concept of marriage, you know?”

Pete’s dad looks like he doesn’t know. He looks at Patrick, which, honestly, is the last place anyone should look if they want answers to important questions. Patrick blinks at the chandelier above their heads and opens his mouth and leaves whatever falls out to whichever higher power wants to deal with this one.

“I agree,” Patrick says, mouth numb. “‘Cause Pete’s an excellent provider.”

“Well, I’m thrilled the two of you figured yourselves out,” Pete’s dad says. He looks hearty and delighted, suddenly. Thrilled at the prospect of his brand new son in law. Patrick feels a very specific kind of awful. “I won’t tell you I’m not a little disappointed you didn’t invite us to share the day, but it’s sensible, at least.”

“Sometimes, the harder the journey, the more you appreciate the destination,” Pete says, eyes twinkling, his hand warm in the small of Patrick’s back. Patrick sags into him, grateful. “But, let’s not tell mom, okay? Not yet.”

Pete Sr looks at Patrick, hands him another glass of champagne and says, “I’m just so  _ relieved _ you chose someone like Patrick.” 

And Pete gives Patrick a smile filled with starlight and says, “Yeah, me too,” and they raise their glasses and Patrick’s got no choice but to toast to that, and drain his glass  _ again.  _

“Welcome to the family!” Pete’s dad says, grabbing Patrick by the hand and pumping his arm in a manly man’s handshake. The sudden shift in equilibrium creates a new issue for Patrick re: possible ralphing. 

Patrick swallows and nods. He says, “Pete is my soulmate,” and he’s not sure he’s telling a lie anymore. “I love him so much. So, so much. Excuse me. I think I’m going to hurl.”

Pete steers him outside and sits him on a bench with a plate of canapes. “You’re drunk,” Pete says, loosening his bow tie. 

Patrick eyes Pete with melancholy. “Yes,” he says, around a mouthful of cheese and pastry. “I am. There was  _ so much  _ champagne, Pete. So much.”

“Good thing you’re cute when you drink,” Pete says, with a broad wink. Pete is terrible at winking, but very good at kissing. Patrick would like less winking and, like, a significant increase in the amount of kissing.

“I’m sorry your dad thinks you excluded him from our imaginary wedding,” Patrick bleats. “I’m a bad friend. If you get disinherited, I’ll never forgive myself.”

“Good news is, my husband’s a television star,” Pete says dryly. “He can keep me in the manner to which I’ve become accustomed.”

Before Patrick can offer feedback on that—and he has a  _ lot  _ of things to say on the matter—someone staggers from the bushes behind them. Two someones, in fact. One in black tie, the other in crushed sapphire velvet. Patrick says, “Brendon?” and Pete says, “Spencer?” and then everyone goes prey animal still. 

“Um,” says Brendon, his pants half-undone. Patrick can see  _ details,  _ and survival instinct does not override his horror. He keeps staring and staring. His gaze holds terrors.

“Mr. Wentz—uh, sir, Mr. Urie and I were discussing his case,” Spencer says, his teddy bear’s face splotching up with embarrassment. 

“Is that so?” Pete looks like he's having the best day of his life. “In the courtyard? Without pants?”

“Spencer is an excellent brief,” Brendon says. “Very thorough. His oral presentations are—”

“Okay!” Patrick shouts, never more sober. “I want to dance. Pete?”

Laughing, Pete whisks him onto the dance floor. They sway together to every holiday favourite, each trying to outdo the other with the cheesiest dad dance moves. Patrick Carlton dances to Kelly Clarkson; Pete throws huge, 90s-style shapes to Mariah. Pete wins—or cheats, he’s a dad, after all, he has a distinct advantage. When the music slows to Wham’s enduring holiday favourite, Last Christmas, Pete grabs Patrick’s by the hips and pulls him in close. Patrick rests his cheek on Pete’s shoulder because he can’t bear to look into Pete’s eyes right now. 

Pete must sense it, because Pete senses everything about Patrick with a clarity that borders on telepathic. He tilts Patrick’s chin, kisses him deep and slow and, when he pulls back, he whispers, “I want you so fucking badly right now.” 

“Take me home then,” Patrick whispers. Pete orders an Uber. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry it's so long, it's the chapter that refused to quit! 
> 
> Also, to those who left a comment accusing me of being a cruel and unyielding writer, those who predicted disaster in the next chapter, I have one thing to say:
> 
> Ha! Gotcha!


	18. Chapter 18

The Uber driver hates them. Patrick doesn’t blame him. If Patrick was an Uber driver, he’d probably hate them, too. 

“I’ll give you so many stars, dude,” he tells the driver. “Like, thousands of stars.”

Then Pete’s hand is creeping up his thigh like a pornographic cat burglar and his mouth is on Patrick’s throat and he’s sucking a hickey there and Patrick feels light enough to take flight. 

Kissing, then. 

Kissing, falling out of the Uber and onto Pete’s driveway. Kissing, pressed against the front door, both their hands in Pete’s hip pocket, feeling for the key, for Pete’s dick. Kissing, kicking the door closed, licking, sucking, biting. Kissing as they fall down onto the first conveniently placed flat surface they bump into. Kissing necks, kissing mouths, kissing Pete.

Patrick recalibrates and finds himself in the living room, straddling Pete’s hips. They’re doing this on the couch, then. Patrick fans his hands over Pete’s chest and feels him all chest and abs. He’s imagined this moment so many times, stopped himself from imagining it almost as many. Patrick pulls back and looks at Pete, his eyes full of stars.

“Should we talk about this?” Patrick asks. In answer, Pete hooks Patrick’s throat with his teeth, presses down until it starts to sting. “Come on, this is important.”

“Talking later. Right now: kissing,” Pete groans. His dick is so hard against Patrick’s thigh it would not suffer description. 

Apparently, champagne makes Patrick earnest, as well as stupid. “This is a big deal. We should, like, discuss things. The sex things. Make sure we’re on the same page. There could be compatibility conflicts.”

“Normal people don’t talk about this, Patrick.”

“It’s important! What if you only like missionary? What if you don’t like spanking and it ends up this big, awkward  _ thing?” _

Pete pulls back, his eyes dark, inscrutable. His hand makes a fist of Patrick’s rump. “Do  _ you _ like spanking,” he asks, curious. 

Patrick shakes his head so fast his neck cramps. “No. Um. Maybe? Well, maybe a little. I don’t know, I’ve never tried it. Sounds wild. Would you like to spank me?”

“I hadn’t thought about it,” Pete says. His brow creases. “But now I kind of can’t think about anything else. Kissing again? Let’s go back to kissing and we can take it from there.”

“Wait!” Patrick yelps. Pete stops. He looks a little less concerned than he did last time, a little more confused. “What—What about you?”

Pete’s brow furrows. “Do I like spanking? I’m open to suggestions. For pretty much anything. C’mon, kiss me.”

Patrick is on the verge of emotional outburst, of a panic attack, and Pete’s not getting this. Patrick is a burning heart of frustration and inevitable sexual failure. “But what do you  _ like?” _

“Patrick,” Pete says, holding Patrick by both shoulders. “I’m measuring the length of time since I last had sex in Brontës, because that way, I only have to say ‘one’. I like  _ you,  _ okay? You’re what I’m into. You could rub my dick with your  _ elbow _ right now, and I’d be into it.”

“Oh,” Patrick says, something warm honeying through him. “You—you like me. That’s—Okay, cool. Kissing, then. It’s—”

Pete shuts him up, mouth first. Despite the champagne, Patrick’s never felt more sober. They undress as much as they can stand; removing jackets means moving apart, but shirt buttons part easy. Patrick bares Pete’s chest and stops, breathless, his thumbs pressed to Pete’s nipples. He looks down at Pete’s chest; ribs and muscle and sharp collar bone. “You are so…” he starts, has to stop. Doesn’t have words for what Pete is. Feels it only in blinding little flashes of heat in his belly.

Pete pulls him down and kisses him again. He trembles under Patrick and Patrick feels some kind of way about that but doesn’t have time to stop or think when he can kiss instead. He kisses Pete’s throat while Pete’s opening Patrick’s shirt and then Pete’s hands are on his chest, his waist, thumbing over his navel and nipples and the golden brown arrow of hair that dips under his belt. Patrick’s straddling Pete’s lap, grinding against him, Pete’s hands on his hips and Patrick’s going to get fucked here, on Pete’s couch, still wearing most of his suit.

That might be a metaphor for most of their relationship so far. Ignore the obvious, do the opposite, wait until the pressure builds and builds and pretend you can hold it back. Act surprised when it bursts like a dam and then—

He groans, “I want you,” and at the exact same moment Pete gasps, “Holy shit—Stop.” 

Patrick’s brain stumbles. “Wait. What?” 

“Not here,” Pete says, grabbing Patrick’s hand. “Upstairs.”

Pete steers Patrick through the dark, sleeping house, groping at Patrick’s butt as they creep up the stairs. Patrick smacks his hands away, halfway between laughing and horny. Funny, how his dick’s already forgotten the interruption, already full and firm in his briefs. They stand at the threshold of Pete’s bedroom like they did four nights ago. This time, it’s not their hearts keeping them apart. This time, it’s a sleeping toddler curled under the comforter, claiming far more mattress than she has any right to take. 

A house this big should have more rooms conducive to hookups of the best friend variety. 

“The bathroom,” Pete whispers, pointing, as if Patrick might’ve forgotten what a bathroom is, or where it is. Honestly, Patrick’s so sex-addled right now that forgetting where the bathroom is might be the least of his worries. He’s worried he might’ve forgotten how to breathe. 

Patrick follows him on exaggerated tiptoes. He doesn’t breathe out until the door closes behind them. “You take me to all the classiest places,” he whispers.

“Yeah, yeah,” Pete says. “Pants off, Stump. Let me, um… maybe not  _ rock _ you world, it’s been a while, but, like, I’m pretty sure I can shake it a little.”

“Sexy.” Patrick hops up onto the counter and spreads his legs. It makes his dick swell over his zipper, the tip wetting the pale grey of his briefs. “So. What’re you going to do to me, now you’ve got me alone?” 

Pete makes a sound Patrick’s never heard a man make before, a gutting groan scraped from the bottom of his belly. He steps forward, grabs Patrick’s knees and meets his lips with bruising force. Patrick’s eyes roll back, his fist curling through Pete’s hair. One thing he’s told himself all this time is that sleeping with Pete would feel weird. The only thing that feels weird is that they haven’t been doing this for years. 

Pete pulls back, his thumb pressed to Patrick’s swollen lower lip.  _ “With _ you,” he growls. Like, legitimately  _ growls. _ “For you. Fuck, I want—I want—” 

Carefully, and maintaining eye contact, Patrick slides his mouth over the tip of Pete’s thumb. He grazes with the barest threat of teeth and tastes the salt of Pete’s skin and imagines other parts of Pete’s body, warm and brackish on his tongue. His dick jumps hard, seeking any source of pressure and friction through pants and briefs. Patrick moans. Patrick sees fucking  _ stars. _

Pete keeps his thumb on Patrick’s lip, holding his mouth open, making it hard to kiss back. His hips sway over Patrick’s briefs and Patrick feels Pete’s erection against his own, hot and hard and urgent. Patrick wants to get on his knees and pull down Pete’s pants and get his mouth all over that cock. Patrick wants to suck Pete’s dick until his eyes water, until his lungs give out, until Pete comes down his throat and Patrick knows exactly how he tastes. 

Patrick whispers, “I hope becoming a dad doesn’t mean you can’t have nasty sex,” and Pete swallows it like an oath. 

“Try me.” 

Carefully not thinking about the consequences of their actions, Patrick lifts his hips in anticipation of Pete’s hands on his ass. Pete’s hand finds Patrick’s cock, squeezing through his underwear, rubbing and tugging and— 

“Daddy?” 

They both freeze. Mouths flush, they look toward the door. Patrick lives the ultimate horror movie experience as the handle begins to turn and something rakes its tiny fingernails along the wood. 

“Did you lock the door?” Patrick hisses. Pete nods and licks Patrick’s nipple, uncoiling a silver thread of sensation. Patrick squeaks, thighs squeezing hips as hands squeeze hair. “Tell her to go back to sleep.”

“You tell her,” Pete whispers, pinching the soft fold of flesh above Patrick’s shorts.

“Sticky?” says Brontë, sounding puzzled. “Where’s daddy?”

Pete bites Patrick’s shoulder. Patrick groans, bites it off, somehow manages to answer the small, cranky Grinch on the other side of the door. “It’s me. Nothing—Nothing to worry about.” Pete scrapes his teeth over Patrick’s collar bone. His fingertips creep along the edge of Patrick’s underwear, seeking heat and hardness. “Go back to sleep, honey.”

Pete laughs, kissing the soft, warm skin under Patrick’s jaw. He presses his palm to Patrick’s cock and holds until Patrick’s hips are squirming, until his heels dig into the back of Pete’s thighs, until the silence on the other side of the door stretches into the possibility that they’ve gotten away with parental duty and— 

“Sticky,” Brontë says again, sadly this time. “I had a bad dream. I need a hug.”

They both exhale. Patrick softens like an overcooked spaghetti noodle with such speed he gets a headrush. Any hope of finishing what is either their best idea or worst mistake drifts away like smoke. 

“Yeah?” Patrick says. “Don’t worry, sweetie, we’re here. I just need to brush my teeth and I’ll be right out.”

When their eyes meet, they’re both laughing. “Fuck,” Pete breathes against Patrick’s neck. “So close.”

“She’s got your sense of timing.”

“And your weird codependency.”

“It’s not weird, she’s  _ three…” _

As they brush, rinse and floss, Patrick waits for the inevitable rush of weirdness, the awkward, friendship-destroying torpedo of  _ I’ve touched your penis.  _ Like the two of them, it doesn’t come. Possibly, you have to achieve sexual congress before the panic sets in. 

“Daddy and Sticky you have been goned forever. I missed you,” Brontë says sadly, little starfish hands held up. 

“We missed you too, baby bear,” Patrick says, scooping her up and plunking her onto the bed. “We’re here now. Come on, time to sleep.”

Parenting, Patrick already knows, is a series of bone-weary moments, veined through with occasional sweetness, caramel sauce in the ice cream of drudgery. It is to love intensely, without the need for reciprocation, or reward, or the promise of eight hours of sleep in any given twenty-four. It’s curling up in bed with your friend, your soulmate and the tiny person he made with someone else and singing American Pie—the unabridged, Don McLean version—until they both fall asleep in your arms. 

“Raincheck?” Pete murmurs, casual as anything, Brontë between them on the bed. “Like, tomorrow. When everyone’s gone. We could, um, pick up where we left off.”

Patrick looks at Pete, at his thick mouth, quick to smiling, at his twinkly amber eyes shinier than anything he’s seen on display in the Field Museum. He examines the parts that make up his best friend in the world. He hesitates. Pete takes his hand. This is their opportunity, Patrick reasons, their chance to back out of whatever this is and carry on as they always have. 

Patrick touches his minty toothpaste mouth to Pete’s. 

“Raincheck,” he agrees. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Again, those who doubted me? Humble pie will be served with your choice of topping :)


	19. Chapter 19

Friday. The final day of filming. The death knell of their marriage. The end of their affair and the start of what comes after. A situation neither of them has talked about because neither of them is ready to talk about their emotions like adults. 

The more Patrick pretends, the more real it feels. It’s like an undiscovered law of thermodynamics. Patrick is happier in this fake marriage than he's felt in his past three real relationships combined. Happier than he’s felt in his life, most likely. Respected, wanted, cared for: these are the ways Pete makes him feel. This is a problem. This is a heartbreak waiting to happen. Patrick is  _ terrified. _

It doesn’t help that Brendon’s got them in matching pyjamas. Patrick can barely handle the rumpled, besuited single father in crooked tie and crumb-spotted dress pants. Pete in an open-necked Henley the colour of heavy cream, unbuttoned to show off an inch or two of winter-pale chest and that distractingly sexy necklace of thorns? Be still his beating heart! 

“So, when we get to the closing shot, I want you on the couch, your head in his lap,” Brendon’s saying. Patrick hears it as if from the bottom of a very deep lake, the only parts that register are  _ your head  _ and  _ his lap. _ He zones back in from the distracting examination of Pete’s mouth.

“Um?” he says.

“Our favourite position. Right, babe?” Pete says, with outrageous eyebrow waggle. 

He’s been doing this all day—tormenting Patrick with physical proximity, pressing up against him in the kitchen, draping over Patrick’s back whenever he stands still. Patrick risks catastrophic electric shock every time, his heart pounding, his lungs stuttering. It’s like his own body is conspiring with Pete’s to kill him stone dead, three days before Christmas. 

Patrick glares at Pete but Pete slings an arm around him, so, clearly he’s not doing a good job of it. The arm on Patrick’s shoulder is marital. The hand straying toward Patrick’s nipple is not. Patrick shoves Pete’s hand away in an act of self-preservation, and Brendon looks at them oddly, like Patrick’s supposed to be all over Pete 24/7, like that’s what married couples  _ do.  _

“Come on, babe,” Patrick says, through gritted teeth. “Not in front of the cameras.”

“What can I say? Matching PJs make me handsy,” Pete says with a wink. 

He nuzzles the side of Patrick’s jaw, kissing Patrick’s pulse where it thunders in his throat. Is it Patrick, or is it really hot in here? Like. Suddenly, uncomfortably hot, for a building with a heating system older than Patrick’s grandma? Patrick sweats into his Henley. Any hotter and he’s going to ignore the time-honoured advice of Jermaine Jackson and start taking his clothes off. 

Brendon walks away, in search of prey no doubt, and Pete’s fingertip finds the pebbled edge of Patrick’s nipple through his shirt after all. Patrick ignites, explodes, goes half-blind from the tsunami-scale force of his own pathetic longing. Once he’s sure he’s got his misbehaving penis under control, he glares and shoves Pete’s hand away again. 

“Can you not?” he grouses. 

“Knew you’d be a nipple guy,” Pete says, with much leer. On anyone else, it would look creepy, but Pete is charming and handsome and the culmination of everything Patrick’s ever wanted. Any irritation is fake, and Pete’s grin says he knows it. Stupid sexy Pete and his stupid sexy mouth.

“I don’t have a nipple thing,” Patrick insists. It’s the truth. He has a  _ Pete _ thing. 

Pete’s grin widens, fangy and sharp. He dips his thumb under the waist of Patrick’s pants, tracing the skin he finds there. Patrick had no idea the small of his back contained so many nerve endings, that each one could light up like a runway at O’Hare. “Not what you were saying last night—”

“Can we  _ not  _ talk about last night right now?” Patrick snaps. He’s being petulant and he doesn’t care. He’s kept his feelings in a box for  _ so long  _ and now they’re pouring out, bubbling over, he is drowning in them. Is it his fault if Pete terrifies him as much as he excites him? It turns out, getting the thing you want is almost as bad as not having it at all. It turns out, once you have the thing you want, you have to worry about  _ losing _ it. Patrick would like to make it through two fucking minutes of today without picturing the inevitable moment he’s measured up to Pete’s expectations, to Pete’s  _ options,  _ and found lacking. 

Patrick feels dizzy. Patrick feels  _ sick.  _ The emotional roller coaster is giving him whiplash and he wants to get off in every single sense of the phrase and Patrick wants… Patrick wants not to want. 

“Hey,” Pete says. His hand curls over Patrick’s in time with another of those waves of fear-lust in Patrick’s belly. “Come on, I’m just messing with you. We don’t—if last night wasn’t a thing for you, that’s okay.”

“Last night was  _ the _ thing for me.  _ You _ are the thing for me,” Patrick blurts out, his heart hotwiring his mouth before his brain has a chance to intervene. Pete’s grin stretches from worried to shit-eating. “Oh, fuck off. Shut up, okay? Just… shut up. Can we rewind a couple seconds and pretend I didn’t say that?  _ Shut up.” _

“I didn’t say a word,” Pete says.

“You don’t have to say actual words with your mouth, you’re saying things with your stupid face,” says Patrick. 

“Cryptophasia,” Pete says sagely, tapping Patrick’s forehead with his finger. 

“Cryptofuckyou,” Patrick snaps, with no heat. This time, when Pete slips an arm around him, he does not pull away. He’s too afraid to move, to break the spell, to jeopardise whatever it is Pete may or may not be thinking. Patrick’s happiest when he doesn’t have to think about these things. 

“You and last night are  _ the _ thing for me, too,” Pete says, his cheeks pinker than they were a second ago. It’s good to know that under the sexy veneer of courtroom control, Pete’s still capable of blushing. “This whole raincheck thing? It’s not, you know, cast in stone or anything. If you want to slow things down, or wait a while, or just… not. Like, whatever you want. I don’t want to, um, make any presumptions.”

Patrick’s whole pulse is throbbing in his ears. The only thing that’s holding him together right now is the knowledge that, when the cameras leave and it’s just the two of them, Pete can take him apart. Patrick wants with an urgency without comparison. 

Patrick closes his eyes and hopes it’ll be easier to communicate how he feels if he’s not looking at Pete while he says it. “I want—Fuck, I want.” 

Pete says, “Tell me.”

Of course, now Pete’s asking him, now the lines of communication are open, Patrick doesn’t know what to say. Confessing his love isn’t easy. If it was, they wouldn’t be in this position. If it was, he wouldn’t ache with a longing a decade in the making. He doesn’t know what he wants because all he can think when he asks himself is:  _ Everything.  _ The family, the life together, the picket fence. In avoiding his feelings, Patrick has a horrible feeling he’s been avoiding himself, like his thoughts about Pete are so intrinsic, so tangled up in his inner working and webbing that the two can’t be separated and if he loses one he’ll absolutely lose the other. 

Patrick might be panicking, just a little. Patrick might be experiencing what his high school guidance counsellor referred to as _ psychological projections.  _

“I want, too,” Pete says, brushing Patrick’s hair off his brow. Patrick’s skin buzzes, like something inside of him is trying to break out and climb inside of Pete. 

“Blocking, people!” Brendon shouts, so irrelevant he might as well be in Milwaukee. Patrick makes a sound of distress into the soft skin under Pete’s jaw. “C’mon, PDA. You’re up.”

“Go,” Pete says, nudging Patrick toward the cameras. 

Patrick goes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So... would you guys hate me if I said this miiiiiight have 25 chapters, instead of the promsied 24?


	20. Chapter 20

Filming goes well. Patrick doesn’t make any terrible mistakes, or else, he’s so focused on Pete that he forgets to notice them. He’s an interior design automaton, existing somewhere outside of the body that pulls toward Pete every time he gets too close. They create their own gravity. Patrick’s not sure if he’s imagining it, or if they really will snap together like magnets. They end with Brendon’s vision: Patrick’s head in Pete’s lap, Brontë tucked into her dad’s side. They wear matching smiles and matching pyjamas and the Christmas lights make Pete’s eyes glitter with starlight. Patrick has never ached so much.

He changes back into his street clothes and washes off the last of the make up while the crew pack up their equipment. Andy says goodbye and congratulations and sorry he couldn’t make it to the wedding and let’s make plans in the new year and then he leaves in a hybrid and a blast of frigid December air. The interns leave. Then the crew leaves. Then Brendon’s standing at the door, frowning at Patrick, his overnight bag on his shoulder, his Uber on the driveway. 

“I still feel like there’s something you’re not telling me,” Brendon says, looking thoughtful. 

“I promise you, there’s nothing weird going on at all. Everything is totally normal,” Patrick lies, about the many weird things in his life that are not normal at all. 

“You know, Spencer and I have been texting.”

“That’s nice.”

“Yeah, I think he’s my boyfriend now. Weird, right? Anyway. He had no idea Pete was married. Isn’t that odd?”

“Pete’s a very private person,” Patrick squeaks. He hopes he’s not glowing as brightly as he feels, they’ll see him from space. 

“Hmm,” Brendon says. 

Patrick pinches the bridge of his nose. He lacks the vocabulary to describe how done he is with this. “Mr. Urie, in the nicest possible way, get off my fucking property. I want to go inside and  _ die _ over how awesome it is to have a living room without you in it. I want to spend the last couple days before Christmas relaxing with my husband and my daughter. I want to do it with you, like, three counties away.  _ At least.  _ Oh, and, like, happy holidays. Goodnight.”

Patrick closes the door on the cold and his boss and a possible HR meeting for insubordination. He locks the lock, bolts the bolt, and chains the chain, then he leans up against it, just to be sure. 

He closes his eyes for a moment, basking in the silence. When he opens them again, Pete is at the top of the stairs, the only person Patrick wants to see tonight. He’s dressed in sweats and a faded DePaul sweatshirt, the hood pulled up and pooling half his face in shadow. His hair is damp from the shower, his hands jammed into his pockets. Their eyes meet like something from a John Hughes movie and Pete smiles, slow and crooked. 

“They’ve gone?” he asks, super casual, like it doesn’t matter at all.

“Yup,” Patrick says, his mouth dry. “All alone.” 

Patrick had no idea how safe a full house has made him feel. Just the two of them now, and he’s never felt so exposed, so feathery with fear. 

“Uh, so. B’s sleeping,” Pete says. Patrick nods. Pete makes a short, pointless gesture. “I don’t know if you want to, like, watch some TV, or...”

Wonderful, beautiful, quixotic: describe your soulmate in three words or less. The look on Pete’s face is obvious—needing, wanting, hungry—and Patrick’s sure it mirrors his own. Patrick doesn’t know if doing this will kill their friendship. He only knows that, like oxygen, he can’t live without it. Heat unfurls in his gut and he’s made of burning fuses. A young man’s just a pulled pin looking for a grenade, after all.

“Kiss me,” is all Patrick says. 

Things happen quickly after that, a blur of syncopated movement. Patrick holds no specific memories of crossing the hallway, or watching Pete descend the stairs. It’s dead space, a not-touching-Pete space. They meet somewhere in the middle, mouths kissing before their limbs catch up. Patrick’s lips clash against Pete’s; Patrick nicks his tongue on Pete’s fangy incisor. They kiss with the force of every kiss they haven’t allowed themselves to kiss. Pete pushes him back against the wall and slides a knee between Patrick’s thighs and Patrick gets hard so fast he feels dizzy. He takes two handfuls of Pete’s hair and he fucking holds on. 

“You are—” Pete’s gasping into Patrick’s mouth.

“Didn’t think you’d ever—” Patrick’s saying back, around a mouthful of Pete’s tongue. 

“I need—”

“Let me—”

“Like this—”

“Fuck, yes. Yes, yes,  _ yes.”  _

They puddle clothes on the route to Pete’s bedroom. Patrick pushes Pete’s hoodie off his shoulders and sucks hard on a dark, tight nipple while Pete’s tangled in the sleeves. Pete shoves down Patrick’s tight jeans until they snag on his thighs. Patrick trips, stumbles into Pete, then the wall, then he’s sliding down Pete’s body. He bites at Pete’s pecs, his nipples, licks his navel and the dark hair just beneath it. On his knees, he meets the cotton-straining head of Pete’s cock through his sweats. He wants this so much. 

“Patrick,” Pete whispers, mouth twisting. Mouths, Patrick thinks, when Pete touches his lower lip, where hearts and truths and vows spill out.

“Patrick,” Pete gasps above him. Patrick looks up and meets Pete’s eyes, finds them filled with fire. With wonder. “Should we—”

“No.” He’s surprised his voice is so firm. Tonight, he’s not talking about the consequences. Tonight, Patrick’s going to act on ten years of wanting.

“Patrick,” Pete says again, like there’s a problem. Patrick’s mouth isn’t on Pete’s cock, that’s the problem.

_ “No.” _

Patrick pulls Pete’s dick out of his sweats and holds it in his hand for the first time. He is reverent, cautious. He touches with unfamiliar wonder, mapping the size and shape of that full, firm flesh curving up toward the tattoo between Pete’s hips. The tip is wet already, shiny as a ring pop. Patrick’s mouth waters, thirsting for the first taste of that big, beautiful cock. 

“Patrick,” Pete whispers.

At dick-level, Patrick makes eye contact with the thing. He licks his lips. He grins filthily. “Fucking  _ finally,” _ he breathes. And then he takes Pete into his mouth. 

Pete yelps, the sound punched out of him, his knees starting to give out. He holds himself up with one hand buried in Patrick’s hair, the other scraping against the wall. Patrick looks up and watches Pete watching him helplessly, his best friend. His favourite “what if”, his best “I’ll never know”. Tonight, Patrick plans on knowing. 

“Patrick,” Pete whispers, touching Patrick’s cheek. He whispers it with so much feeling. 

Patrick resolves to take his time. He does not, will not, rush this. He sucks Pete’s dick with hollowed cheeks and curious arcing tongue. He learns the shape of Pete in his mouth, the weight, the—fuck, yes—the taste. His tongue swirls the head, licking salt from the cleft of it. The gorgeous, breathless noises spilling from Pete’s throat guide him, urge him on, show him where to lick and how to suck. Patrick holds Pete’s hips with bruising force and feels the length of Pete’s dick slip down his throat until his eyes water. 

Pete is so, so gentle, cupping Patrick's jaw with both hands. He strokes Patrick’s hair and his cheeks, thumbs his lips and wipes the wet corners of Patrick’s eyes. Even in this apocalyptic moment of hard-ons and haziness, Pete is tender. He meets Patrick’s look, his eyes golden, melting,  _ happy,  _ and didn’t Patrick do that? Didn’t Patrick inspire that happiness? Patrick sucks, swallows, licks until Pete’s sweating and trembling, until Pete slides his thumb into his own mouth and bites down on the knuckle to muffle his cries. 

Pete’s hips buck, his groans pitching deeper, more urgent, his hand in Patrick’s hair pulling into a fist. Patrick sucks until his jaw aches, sucks with a single-minded purpose. If he doesn’t taste Pete’s come, if he doesn’t feel the hot, wet spurt of it at the back of his throat, he might die. Heartbeat accelerating, Patrick swallows more, lets his nose meet the brackish curl of Pete’s pubic hair, his own moans vibrating over Pete’s cock. Yes, to this. Yes to all of this. 

It happens suddenly. Pete’s hips twitch; an involuntary stutter, uncontrolled, giving in, collapsing. Patrick hangs on with a fistful of sweatpants and asscheek, bobs-swallows-sucks, wants, wants, wants. Pete comes on a pained breath, knees finally buckling. His dick pops out of Patrick’s mouth, cherry red and shining, his come in Patrick’s mouth, on his lip, dripping down his chin, streaking his chest. Patrick swallows and tastes Pete’s come, salty, hot, not bitter at all. 

They lie on the floor together. Flushed and sweaty between Pete’s bent knees, his chest quick with rosy breath, Patrick bites his lip. That’s it—Patrick has sucked his best friend’s dick, got him off, tasted come and sweat and musk skin. This is a mountain that cannot be unclimbed. For the first time since he moved toward Pete in the hallway, Patrick hesitates. 

Pete touches one of the tiny pearls on Patrick’s chin, examines his own glistening orgasm on his fingertip and then wipes it over Patrick’s bottom lip. Patrick’s stomach drops hard, his cock twitching, his whole nervous system lit up bright as Christmas. Patrick’s still hard, still aches, still wants.

“That was amazing,” Pete says. The look on his face is wondering, desperate, not sated at all. His dick is not quite hard, not quite soft, begging to be coaxed back to glorious fullness, spit-wet from the recency of Patrick’s eager mouth. “I need…”

“I know,” Patrick says, kissing Pete hard. Pete is licking his own come from Patrick’s mouth and—God,  _ god.  _ Patrick looks at Pete’s shiny lips. He cannot even with this man. “Take me to bed.”

The journey from hallway to bedroom blurs. Patrick is aware of hands on his hips and a tongue in his mouth and a half-hard dick flush against his own. They stick together: sweat, or come, or else their own gravity. Pete’s hands are urgent, peeling off Patrick’s jeans and boxers in two clumped fistfuls that snag on his ankles. Patrick half-chokes himself yanking off his t-shirt, Pete’s mouth fastened to his even through the cotton. After so long keeping carefully apart, any distance is unbearable, Patrick’s body aches for Pete’s even now, so close not even sweat slides between them.

“Never seen this much of you,” Pete murmurs. He maps Patrick’s chest, hips, thighs with an innocent sort of wonder.

Patrick pulls Pete back to his mouth. “You never told me you wanted to.”

“Thought it was obvious.”

“Nothing is obvious with us, apparently.”

“This,” Pete says, guiding Patrick’s hand to his dick, “this is obvious.”

_ “Hello,  _ Mr. Obvious.”

They fall back onto the bed, breathless and naked and laughing into each other’s mouths. Patrick lands on top of Pete, straddling his hips and grinding down, seeking pressure and friction. From his angle, he can feel Pete’s dick swelling against his, all heat and hardness. Patrick rolls his hips and Pete sucks Patrick’s bottom lip into his mouth and bites down, smiling. The important thing is that they do not stop kissing. That they never stop kissing.

Pete gets a hand around Patrick’s dick and tugs him raw and wanting. He’s sloppy, unrefined, it’s clear he hasn’t done this in a while and that twists Patrick’s gut. “Can I?” Pete asks, looking down at Patrick’s dick popping pink and shiny through his fist.

“Yes,” Patrick says, immediately, without needing to ask what Pete’s going to do. In truth, at this point, Pete could do anything to him. Pete should do  _ everything _ to him. Patrick lets Pete steer him onto his back and tilts his hips, anticipating.

Impatient whimpers emit from Patrick’s throat and Pete’s mouth fastens onto his Adam’s apple, as if the vibrations can be interpreted like Morse code. As if Patrick’s need isn’t entirely fucking obvious. Pete upends the contents of his nightstand over the floor with a snarl and emerges, victorious, with condom and lube. 

“Check the expiration,” Pete says, tossing it to Patrick.

Patrick frowns and squints at the wrapper. “Don’t these things last for actual years?” 

Pete’s blush is nuclear. “Did I stutter? Check the expiration.”

Patrick can’t pass up the opportunity to tease. “Aww, do we have a born-again virgin? Am I breaking you in? That’s adorable.”

“I can put my pants back on. Like, that’s a thing I can do.”

_ “Pants? _ Where we’re going, we don’t need  _ pants!”  _ Patrick says, in Doc Brown’s voice. 

Pete puts a hand over Patrick’s mouth. “Shut up.” And he bites onto Patrick’s nipple and Patrick stops talking.

Patrick grinds up to Pete, thighs snugged around his waist, an unconscious conductor of hedonism and need. He’ll be okay as long as Pete keeps doing this, as long as Pete keeps touching him, as long as Pete stays close. 

When Pete touches his asshole, it feels more like a cattle prod than a lubed finger. Patrick startles, his full body rigid, a tiny gasp of, “Oh,” squeezed from his lungs. A moment later:  _ “Oh.”  _ Patrick gives, melts, puddles warm into the mattress as Pete gives him one finger then two, as he finds the nervy throb of Patrick’s prostate and Patrick turns to jelly. Pete’s grin is so smug as to be insufferable. Patrick adds his own finger alongside Pete’s, determined not to be outdone. They open him up together, slick and slow and easy. 

“Fuck me,” Patrick whispers, nails biting five tiny crescents into Pete’s shoulder.

“Yeah,” Pete murmurs, smiling. 

They fight the condom wrapper with slippery fingers, rolling lubed rubber over Pete’s dick. Patrick straddles the bony cradle of Pete’s hips, lines up and, holding eye contact, sinks down onto that thick, gorgeous cock in one smooth motion. It’s important that he’s quick, that doesn’t give himself time to overthink this. They both cry out, Pete fills him hard and good and true, like all this time they’ve been matched for one another, like every fuck Patrick’s had has been time wasted when he could’ve been doing this. 

“You are—” Pete groans, holding on to Patrick with two handfuls of butt cheek, pulling him apart, pressing in deeper.

“You’re so—” Patrick answers, then Pete’s mouth seals over his and they’re moving together, easy as heartbeats, breathing from one another’s lungs. With every kiss, Pete sucks Patrick’s bottom lip into his mouth. Patrick has Pete’s hair in his fists and every thrust, every equal and opposite reaction of their hips, sends him spiraling closer and closer to that cliff’s edge. 

The noises Pete makes would not pass for English, but Patrick understands. Patrick is making them, too. Patrick is holding on to Pete and hanging on to the last few threads of self control because he wants this to last forever, or: he wants  _ Pete _ forever and his hips and heart don’t understand the difference. Patrick fucks himself on Pete’s dick with his blood boiling molten and his cock throbbing sore.

Pete flips them again, rolling Patrick under him but staying somehow deep inside as he does it. Patrick lifts his hips to meet the new angle of Pete’s thrusts and Pete’s tip finds his prostate and Patrick just about goes fucking cross-eyed from the magma hot intensity of it. Pete worries at the edge of Patrick’s orgasm, dragging at it, pulling it, untangling it thread by golden thread. Patrick buries his cries in Pete’s skin, biting into his throat, licking endemic heat into his pecs. Pete wraps a hand around Patrick’s cock and pulls it raw, brings their hips together again and again and again until—

Patrick comes like a timed detonation, like his body is a conduit to another place entirely, like he’s freefalling through space-time with dazzling intensity. Patrick comes so hard he tastes it, spurting over Pete’s chest and abs, dripping into the hot, humid space between their bodies. He comes equal parts hanging on and  _ laughing.  _ Pete makes a strange, startled sound and presses in deep, deeper, deepest. He goes rigid, Patrick feels the twitch inside of him, Pete’s eyes so wide and clear and golden brown as he comes. 

Pete leans his forehead against Patrick’s, still inside of him, laughing too.  _ Laughing  _ during sex—Patrick is delighted by the things he can do with Pete. He curls his hand around Pete’s neck and kisses him with ten years of longing.

“That was incredible,” Pete says. 

“That was the warm up. Give me ten minutes, then permission requested to  _ really _ rock your world,” Patrick says, grinning and breathless. 

“That’s a big claim.”

“I’m a big guy,” Patrick counters, resting his hand over Pete’s on his spent-for-now cock. 

Pete kisses Patrick like he’s claiming him:  _ This one is mine. _ “Permission granted.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No cockblocking! They finally did it!


	21. Chapter 21

Patrick wakes in Pete’s bed for the fifth time in a week. It is the first time he’s woken there naked.

He feels more rested than he has in a year, more rested than he has any right to be given they passed out barely thirty minutes ago. Given the things they did in the hours that preceded passing out. It’s like he’s woken every morning holding for the past ten years holding his breath. Now, he exhales. He wriggles his toes under the sex-smelling sheets. He waits to feel fear, to feel regret, but all he finds in the bottom of his Christmas stocking of emotion is peace.

They should’ve done this years ago.

For the first time since  _ his _ first time, Patrick’s instinct isn’t to feel for his clothes and the door. He doesn’t want to gnaw off his own arm to escape the one thrown over him, and not just because bodily fluids have glomped them together like sun-softened gummy bears. This is different to every other man he’s been with, because this man is Pete and Patrick’s been in love with him for as long as he remembers  _ understanding _ romantic love. The simple truth is, being with Pete makes him happy. Patrick’s missed feeling happy.

It’s still dark outside and waking everyone in the house in search of a hot shower and coffee is strictly verboten, so he lies awake and watches Pete sleep, like a creep. He looks at Pete’s hands on his chest and thinks of those long fingers inside of him. Pete’s mouth, swollen with sleep, hollowed around his aching cock. There’s not a single part of that body that Patrick hasn’t touched now, hasn’t licked or rubbed or kissed. Patrick’s never had sex like that; fierce and possessive and sweet and tender. He knows now how Pete tastes, inside and out and that’s… It’s a lot to take in.

So, Patrick watches Pete sleep, naked and vulnerable and curled into Patrick’s side. He feels warmed through with new love.

Eventually, Pete stirs. He blinks, cringing against the gloom, confused and gorgeous until he remembers, and then he looks  _ happy _ and gorgeous. He smiles at Patrick and wipes the crust from his eyes and Patrick finds that charming, too. “Hey, you,” he rasps. “Time is it?”

“A little after five,” Patrick says. 

Pete makes a sound like an angry porcupine and burrows under the covers. Only his trashy bed head and a single, carmel-coloured eye remain above-comforter. “Patrick. Babe,” he says. “We sleep when the kid sleeps, that’s, like, a  _ golden _ rule, ‘kay? If she’s out, we’re out.”

“So, last night was an anomaly?” Patrick asks, looking innocent. “No more all-night marathon sex where we work out exactly how much you can take before you pass out?”

The second eye appears alongside the first, then Pete’s nose, then his blinding grin. “Who needs sleep?” Pete throws himself at Patrick and clamps on like a koala. “Missed you.”

Patrick laughs. “I knew you’d be a cheesy lines guy.”

“Better than being a nipple guy.”

“Fuck off, I’m not—” Pete thumbs over his nipple. Patrick makes a sound that could be mistaken for a moan. Pete looks smug. “Oh, whatever. It’s biology.”

“No way, babe. Like Huey Lewis said, that’s the power of nipples,” Pete says, laughing and finding all of Patrick’s ticklish spots. 

“No, he didn’t say that.”

“Let me teach you the lyrics, lunchbox…”

Pete isn’t shy, so Patrick resolves he won’t be, either. Patrick seizes his courage in both hands and presses a kiss to Pete’s sleep-and-fuck flushed mouth. Pete kisses back and Patrick feels like he’s got the sunrise in his veins. He glows from the inside.

Maybe another Patrick would say something romantic or cute, but Patrick is Patrick and he’s been Pete’s best friend for the sum total of his adult life. Some things ascend sex and love and so he says, “Fuck, your breath  _ stinks,” _ and Pete’s still Pete so he flips Patrick onto his back and pins his wrists over his head and  _ breathes _ his rancid dumpster breath all over Patrick’s face. It’s exactly how it always was except now they’re naked and they’re hard and when Patrick worms a hand free, he doesn’t use it to grab a pillow and smother Pete until he stops kicking. Instead, he wraps it around Pete’s cock and that—Pete’s fat, red dick in his fist—is a change he could get used to.

“Do I get to wake like this every morning,” Pete asks, his eyes shining.

Patrick sprawls on his stomach between Pete’s legs, using the comforter to apply pressure and friction to his dick. Everything between hips and knees feels tight and hot, like a sunburn. Refractory periods mean nothing to Patrick right now. His blood and tissue defies biology, already half-swollen again, throbbing for Pete’s touch. He licks the tip of Pete’s cock. “Fuck me in the shower and I’ll think about it,” he offers.

Pete laughs and chases him into the bathroom, pinching his thighs and swatting at his bare ass. They don’t make it to the shower. Patrick lets Pete press him over the vanity and watches Pete watching him in the mirror, his eyes serious, his mouth a straight line of frowning concentration. He gasps when Pete slides inside of him, meeting Pete’s eyes in the glass. “Bet I can make you come first,” Pete murmurs, pressing the words into the skin at Patrick’s nape. His fingers look so dark over Patrick’s pale, pale hips. “Bet I can make a sticky fucking mess of you.”

“Sounds like I win either way,” Patrick replies, tightening up around Pete just to hear him groan. Pete grabs Patrick by the chin, steers his mouth, parts his teeth and kisses him. 

They don’t speak again until Pete’s made a sticky fucking mess of him. 

Dressed in sweatpants, Patrick lies on Pete’s bed. His body a single throbbing nerve, he accepts that, possibly, they need a break. As fun as marathon, new discovery sex might be—and god,  _ god,  _ it’s  _ so much fun— _ they can’t condense ten missed years of brain-frying fucking into one morning. He’s  _ aware  _ of his glutes and, like, he’s never been aware of his glutes in his life. Thanks for nothing, P90X. First order of business is finding carbs and caffeine and trans fats. He’ll worry about core work later. 

“Should we eat?” he says to Pete, nuzzling under his jaw. Pete’s dressed in clean boxers and a constellation of hickeys across his hips and chest. 

“Can’t move, you’ve fucked me dead, Stump. Go, forage, bring back calories,” Pete says, squeezing a fistful of Patrick’s sturdy thigh through his sweatpants. His fingers trip along the bare valley of Patrick’s spine, exploring every freckle and birthmark. 

Patrick arches into the touch like a cat, sated all the way down to his marrow. “Fuck you, you’re supposed to feed me. I’ve watched the Hallmark movies; I recognise a romantic pancake interlude when I see one.”

Pete kisses behind Patrick’s ear, smiling sweet as syrup. “And if I refuse?”

“Then I guess I’ll have to eat Brontë,” Patrick shrugs, looking sad about it. “It’s terrible, I know, but she’s had a good run.”

“Monster,” Pete says lazily, rolling off the bed. He slips back into his DePaul hoodie and hands Patrick the same soft-smelling Cubs sweater he pulled on a million years ago and leads the way to the kitchen via Brontë’s room. Patrick follows, a sleepy-eyed Brontë on his hip.

They sit at the counter, Patrick and Pete’s kiddo, and watch Pete mixing Bisquick and heating the skillet. When he drops the first ladle of batter into the pan, Brontë cheers and throws her chubby little arms around Patrick’s neck.

“Look, daddy!” Brontë shrieks, pointing.

Pete goes very still and Patrick goes stiller yet, because Brontë isn’t looking at Pete. She’s looking right at Patrick. It’s like a bomb going off; like the aftermath of a blast, all Patrick can hear is the ringing in his ears. 

Patrick begins to panic. As usual, his panic manifests as sweat. This isn’t the first time she’s called him that, but it’s the first time she’s said it and looked at him and  _ meant  _ it. It’s like being punched in the heart with responsibility. Patrick doesn’t move, or blink, or breathe. Both Wenzes staring at him, he looks at a chip on the marble countertop. When he tries to speak, a strange, lowing moo falls out of him. 

Brontë shakes him by the arm. “Daddy? Look, pancakes. You see them, daddy? You see them? Daddy?” Her voice is adorable; sweet and shiny as a candy apple and the last thing on earth Patrick wants to hear right now.

Patrick makes another helpless sound around the rock of red-hot iron in his throat. He might be having a panic attack. 

“Patrick?” Pete says cautiously.

It’s not that he doesn’t love these two humans with his whole body, self, soul, but. 

It’s not that he hasn’t imagined this a thousand times, but. 

It’s not that he wants to hurt them, but.

Not for the first time where Pete’s concerned, language fails him. There are no obvious answers. All he knows is he needs to leave before something terrible happens. 

“Daddy?” Brontë says, climbing into his lap and grabbing him by two tiny fistfuls of bed head. “Daddy, look.”

“Uh, yeah,” he says. His smile feels slashed on his mouth, an open wound. “I, uh, I see them, pumpkin.”

When Patrick’s phone buzzes, he jumps like it’s a gunshot. It’s a Grindr notification, a message from someone called Ray. Patrick doesn’t clearly remember swiping on someone named Ray, but Ray is asking if Patrick still wants to go for a drink tonight. Ray doesn’t have kids, according to his Grindr profile. Ray doesn’t have tiny, clinging, helpless little humans who will hang off Patrick’s sleeves and expect him to make correct choices, who will be  _ damaged _ when Patrick fucks up. And Patrick will fuck up, because he’s Patrick and fucking up is in his DNA. 

Is it suddenly, suffocatingly hot in here? Like. Unreasonably, horribly hot? He needs some fucking  _ air. _

“I have to go,” he says, pushing his plate away and setting Brontë back on her own stool. There’s something rising at the back of his throat. Fuck—Is he going to throw up? 

Pete frowns. “What? Why?”

“I just… I can’t.” He leaves it at that. Can’t do this. Can’t hurt them. Can’t stay. Can’t breathe. “I’m sorry. I can’t mess this up.”

Pete looks panicked now. He looks furious. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“I have to go,” he says again, grabbing his coat and his car keys, shoving his feet into his boots. “I’m sorry. But I have to go.”

Patrick tumbles out of the house and into the snow and staggers to his car. He drives across Chicago, too fast, drowning out the buzzing in his head with the radio. It’s not until he collapses into his apartment that he realises he’s still wearing Pete’s grandfather’s wedding ring.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, um. How 'bout that? At least it wasn't Brendon!


	22. Chapter 22

Less than 24 hours since Patrick scrambled into bed with his best friend and detonated a nuclear device in the middle of his life and he’s on a date with another man. 

It looks skeevy. It  _ is _ skeevy. Patrick  _ feels  _ skeevy and itchy and nauseated and the only place he wants to be less than on this date is in Pete’s house, explaining to Pete why a relationship with him will never work. Patrick makes horrible choices. Patrick is a terrible model of boyfriendhood. This is a bellwether example of why he’s still single. 

For the first time, he hasn’t told Pete he’s going on a date. He doesn’t want to have that conversation where Pete looks sad that Patrick picked someone else, or else looks  _ thrilled  _ that Patrick’s dating someone else because—unshakeable fucking  _ truth— _ Pete can do better than dating Patrick. 

So, no wingman, no phone calls from the bathroom and Patrick’s okay with that. He’s an adult, capable of assessing the potential risk in dating situations. Betting odds are, Patrick  _ won’t  _ end up in tiny pieces dumped off Navy Pier, no matter how much he deserves it. They’ve exchanged last names and Ray’s sent a picture of his penis that Patrick didn’t ask for, so Patrick’s as sure as he can be that he’s not on a date with a serial killer. If he is, at least his cell phone contains identifying information. Hard evidence, as it were.

Dressed in his second best jeans and one of his trusty roster of cardigans, he meets Ray at a tiny hole-in-the-wall jazz place in Logan Square. Ray’s as tall and broad as his Grindr pic suggests, with a wide mouth and thick curls, prone to rioting. Ray goes in for a hug when they meet and Patrick counters with a weirdly formal handshake so they both wind up looking awkward and confused. According to his profile, Ray is 34 and a professional musician. According to Patrick, Ray is a distraction, or an instinct he can’t shake off. Something to plug the hole inside his heart, if not his body. 

At least one thing is obvious—Patrick can’t have sex with Ray. Vibrating with the touch memory of Pete’s hands on his skin, he’s not sure he can have sex with anyone ever again. 

The club is nice; exposed brickwork, Edison bulbs, a whisky tasting menu chalked on the board behind the bar. The bartenders wear a uniform of flannel shirts, waxed facial hair, and an air of bored pretension. It’s exactly the sort of place Patrick’s started 80-percent of his lengthy resume of Grindr dates, exactly the sort of place Pete would tease him about without mercy. 

For all that, Patrick barely registers his surroundings. He orders a pitcher of mulled wine and sits at a table for two with Ray and listens to the band play All Alone on Christmas and wants to fucking die. Ray strikes up eight different conversations and Patrick snuffs out every single one. For the first time in his adult life, he thinks he might be bad at dating. 

It turns out, Ray works out of a studio in Logan Square. Their careers don’t overlap. They have no friends, associates, or media acquaintances in common. Chances are, metalhead guitarists don’t spend their free time leafing through lifestyle magazines looking for recipes for chicken cacciatore, and if they  _ do, _ Patrick’s buzzed enough that he doesn’t care if Ray’s an undercover investigative journalist. He’s buzzed enough that the unlikelihood of undercover journalists taking interest in a lifestyle influencer’s fake marriage doesn’t occur to him. 

Three-quarters deep in their second pitcher of mulled wine, he gives in and starts to spill the juicier details of his current Major Life Catastrophe. 

“... and that’s how I lied, dragged my friend into it, and ruined my fucking life,” he finishes, with minimal jazz hands. 

“Jesus, dude. No wonder you’re depressed,” Ray laughs and sloshes another couple of inches of wine into each of their glasses. 

Patrick squints doubtfully. “Sorry, I’m rambling. I should stop drinking. I’m not a great drunk.”

Ray shakes his head. “Last one, I promise,” he says. “It sounds like you need it.”

“You’re really nice,” Patrick says, chin propped on his fist. “You remind me a lot of my friend, actually. Not how you look, that—couldn’t be more different, honestly. But, like, he’s nurturing and stuff. Kind. God, he’s such a great guy. He’s a—”

“Single dad,” Ray’s handsome face creases into a big grin of such irritating  _ knowing, _ “yeah, you mentioned that. More than once, actually.”

Patrick presses his eyes closed for a second, sweating hard. He really ought to eat, or at the very least stop drinking, but the bar stopped serving food an hour ago and he’s not ready to sober up. For want of carbs, he takes a big, cinnamon gulp of ill-advised liquid courage and blinks at Ray from behind his glasses. 

“Did I?” he says, vague. 

“You did,” Ray confirms. “Do you want to talk about it, or…?”

The look on Ray’s face suggests he’s hoping for ‘or’.

“No,” Patrick says, shaking his head hard enough to inspire vertigo. Then: “We slept together last night. It was, and I’m not exaggerating, the best sex of my life. And I’ve had a lot of sex, you know. I have, like, a far-reaching basis on which to draw comparison.”

Patrick lists heavily on his stool, almost falls the head-cracking drop onto the concrete floor. Ray catches him and props him up against the table. Ray is so nice. Patrick belches delicately and tastes vomit.

“For someone who can’t stay upright, that was quite a sentence,” Ray says lightly, stepping out of the splash zone. Patrick knows from experience that everyone leaves an internet date with a second date or a story. He knows, unequivocally, which he will be for Ray. 

“It was quite a night,” Patrick says, draining his mulled wine and holding out his glass for more. Ray tops him off but maybe starts to look concerned about it. 

“So, why aren’t you with him now,” Ray asks. He’s wearing the look of a man who stopped thinking with his dick an hour ago, a man calculating the best possible escape route. Patrick wonders if Ray blogs, and, if he does, if Patrick’s going to feature on it tomorrow. 

Patrick shrugs. “Because I’m a fuck up. Because I spent ten years wishing he’d notice me, and when he did, I just—My whole fucking  _ life _ was pounding in my ears, you know? He’s got this kid—”

“Single dads tend to have kids, yes.”

“This  _ amazing _ kid, and this morning she called me  _ daddy. _ I’ve never thought about being anyone’s daddy, Ray. Well, outside of a couple of super specific fantasies, but we don’t have to talk about that. I can’t take on that kind of responsibility, really I can’t. I can’t—I can’t  _ hurt  _ them. They deserve a better man than me.”

Patrick reaches for the pitcher but Ray beats him to it and tops off his own glass. “Pete doesn’t seem to think so. Remind me, mind-blowing sex aside,  _ who  _ ran away?”

Patrick glares, considering. He doesn’t like being told truths about his life. “Your point?”

“Okay, so. I have a question,” Ray says, spreading his hands on the table.

Patrick tips the mulled wine pitcher over his glass and nothing but booze-soaked fruit flops out. Not to be defeated, he fishes out an orange slice and sucks until he tastes liquor. “Yeah?”

“Does your friend  _ know  _ you ran away because your feelings terrify you, or were you planning on keeping it to yourself and looking like the biggest fucking asshole?”

Patrick chokes on his orange slice. He stares at Ray, an order of magnitude too drunk to deal with this. He fucked up this date before it even started, didn’t actually want to go on this date in the first place, is punishing both of them by insisting on going along with the muscle memory of swiping left. But, still. He doesn’t deserve to be called out like this. 

“I have no idea what the fuck you’re talking about,” he says eventually, his voice flat. “I’m not—God, I can’t believe I’m saying this—I’m not trying to hurt him, alright? Come on. I’m trying  _ not _ to hurt him.”

Ray looks at him. It’s a knowing look, a look Patrick’s not fond of at all. “You should talk to him.” he says, tipping up one shoulder in a shrug. “Or, like, you should  _ not _ talk to other people until you’ve figured it out, stop wasting everyone’s time. This is a terrible date. If you were an Uber driver, I’d give you negative stars.”

Patrick shakes his head and coughs up a laugh that gets lodged in his throat. “Is it  _ that _ bad?”

“The fucking worst,” Ray tells him cheerfully, slipping into his jacket. “I’m sticking with Hinge from now on. When everyone said Grindr’s full of weird twinks with daddy issues this is, like—I didn’t think I’d meet a weird twink with  _ literal  _ daddy issues.” 

Through the door and out into the sobering cold of a Chicago winter night, Patrick stands shivering on the sidewalk, waiting for his Uber, his glasses fogging from the warmth of his breath. He’s looking for a blue Ford Fusion. The good news is, he knows  _ blue;  _ it’s the same colour as his fingertips, shoved into the pockets of his winter coat. 

While he waits, his phone buzzes with an incoming text. He fumbles, thinking  _ Pete,  _ but it’s Brendon. 

_ Spoke to Gerard about possible projects for you in the new year. He wants a series following the ground-up renovation of that beautiful house in the burbs. You and Pete co-hosting, fee negotiable.  _

_ o _

_ No rush, but let me know where you’re at after the holidays.  _

_ By the way, I know you’re not married to Pete.  _

_ pls dont fire me _

_ No one is getting fired. You can thank me for not ratting you out to Gerard later.  _

_ I like champagne, in case you felt like sending a gift basket.  _

_ on it _

_ Also, consider marrying Pete for real. I think he’d really like it if you married him for real.  _

Patrick stares at the message for a long time. Then, carefully, and without thinking about it at all, he slides his phone back into his pocket. He’s been hiding from his fear of intimacy his whole life, it feels like. What’s another night?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, yes. He went on a date with Ray. Just remember that I love you, and it’s Christmas.


	23. Chapter 23

Patrick wakes, hungover and alone.

Bed? No—couch. Also: pain. Head and heart, one physical, the other… less so. He’s not wearing his pants, glasses or shirt, but he  _ is _ wearing his cardigan. There’s a strong, damp-rot smell of red wine, wet wool and shame leaking over the room, a smell he thinks is him. A grating, high-pitched ringing buzzes between his ears, like his own sense of inadequacy has taken auditory form. 

It’s Christmas Eve. Tomorrow, he’ll go to his mom’s house and his mom will ask about Pete and Brontë, and the things she’s seen on TV. Patrick will paste on a smile.  _ It was all a game, ma,  _ Patrick will say. Patrick will force himself to believe this. Not believing it is an impulse that guides him to the rocks and dashes him to splinters the size of matchsticks.

It’s very important that Patrick does not confront the truth.

Clearly, he’s feeling sorry for himself. More than that, he’s feeling  _ terrible _ for Pete and Brontë who have no idea why his absence is the best thing for them. He’s thinking of everything he’s lost and feeling sticky with self-loathing, wondering how long it takes to mummify like a bog body when he realises the shrill, persistent shrieking isn’t his headache or his conscience. It’s the door buzzer.

He rolls onto his side and squints at the flashing red light above the intercom. He’s not answering. Like,  _ obviously  _ he’s not answering. Answering the door is for people wearing pants. He buries his head under his pillow and twists the comforter on top for good measure. Patrick is in no mood to socialize.

It makes as little as no difference. The buzzer shrills without stopping—broken or glitching or kids playing a prank. Patrick’s apartment is a trendy, open concept loft space without much in the way of walls or doors. The vaulted ceilings are high, evocative of cathedrals, prone to dramatic echo. When he chose this apartment, he did so for the entertaining space, the clean visual lines. He should’ve thought about sound-proofing.

The buzzer stops. Patrick enjoys eleven beautiful seconds of silence before his phone bursts into life on the nightstand. This is war, clearly. Well, in the immortal words of Bobby Ray Brown, two can play that game. Patrick hunkers under his stale-smelling sheets and initiates trench warfare. The buzzer starts again.

“Mrrrmph,” says Patrick, into his couch cushions. Maybe, Patrick thinks hopefully, it’s a bear. A big, furious bear that can break down the door and maul him to death. 

Except, it might be Pete. Pete with Brontë in her snow boots and Patrick can make them hot chocolate and order breakfast from the restaurant on the corner. Patrick can take Pete’s hand and say all the things he should’ve said yesterday; that he’s a coward, that Pete’s better off with Patrick on the edges of his life rather than dead centre. He can  _ fix _ everything.

He rolls over, grabs his phone and stabs the green button without opening his eyes. “Pete?”

“Are you fucking kidding me?” Joe shrieks.

Wincing so hard his face hurts, Patrick pulls the phone away from his ear. “I’m sorry, you’ve reached the voicemail of Patrick Stump. Please leave a message after the beep and I’ll get back to you. Uh,  _ beep.” _

“I told you,” says Joe, terrible friend. “Didn’t I tell you? Didn’t I say this would happen? Do you ever listen to me?”

“I’m not letting you inside if you’re going to yell at me,” Patrick mutters into his couch. “In fact, I’m not letting you inside at all. I’m going to call Andy—”

“Andy’s here.” Andy sounds kinder than Joe, kinder than Patrick deserves. “Andy’s sad you lied to him about marrying Pete. Andy’s worried you fucked everything up. Would you like to let Andy and Joe inside and we can talk about this?”

“Could Andy stop talking about himself in the third person?” Patrick begs. He passes a hand over his sticky brow. “Listen, I need you to leave. I’m going back—Well, I’m going  _ to  _ bed. For the rest of the year, probably.” 

“The year ends in, like, a week,” Andy points out, ruining Patrick’s attempt at dramatic flair and his life.

“I know,” Patrick says, irritated, tugging at his hair. “But I’ll have to go to work, won’t I? Could you leave me alone?”

“We just came from Pete’s place,” Joe says and nothing more, offering Patrick just enough rope to climb aboard the life raft or hang himself.

Patrick falters. “Um… The thing is—"

“We’re coming up,” Joe says, more promise than threat because Patrick gave Joe a key when he moved in. For emergencies, he said at the time. Well, this is a fucking emergency, he supposes.

More angst than man, Patrick curls in a sweaty, sour-smelling ball by the door and waits.

“Fuck’s sake,” says Joe, standing in the arch of Patrick’s unlocked front door. He looks angry and Patrick whimpers, curled on the floor in yesterday’s boxers, wishing ardently that he’d used the time it took them to get upstairs to put on pants.

“Are you okay?” says Andy, and Patrick nods his head in a daze. He’s not okay, but he doesn’t have the right to say that, does he? He’s ruined his own life and wrecked his best friend’s heart and that excuses him from feeling sorry for himself, no matter how fucking awful he feels.

“‘M fine,” he mumbles. And then he starts crying, as if his life couldn’t possibly get anymore embarrassing. 

Andy pulls Patrick into a crushing hug. He hugs long and fierce, like a dad, and he smells like a locker room shower cubicle and before Patrick knows what’s happening, he’s crying into Andy’s hoodie while Andy rubs little circles into his spine and says “That’s it, sport” and “Let it all out, buddy.” It’s very comforting—Patrick hasn’t felt this comforted since grade school. So Patrick does. He lets it all out. He fucking howls.

When he’s done snotting all over Andy’s jacket, Patrick sits back against the wall and looks up at the two people in the world he loves almost as much as Pete.  _ Almost  _ as much, but not quite. There’s a difference between romantic and platonic love. Patrick is learning the difference.

Andy, a better host than Patrick, murmurs something about drinks and moves to the kitchen area of Patrick’s sad, open plan living space. While he crushes ice and slices limes, Patrick buries his fists in his hair and stairs at the woodgrain on his reclaimed floorboards. He feels slimy all over, like something that crawled out of the primordial ooze and slithered into a lakeside apartment.

“I can’t  _ believe  _ you did this to him,” Joe says, voicing Patrick’s thoughts in an unnerving way. 

“Joe!” Andy cuts in, chiding.

“No, he needs to hear it,” Joe says, furious. “The world doesn’t revolve around Patrick Stump and his fucking  _ hasthtag _ feelings.”

“Don’t hashtag me,” Patrick says in a small voice. “I have to use Twitter for work. You’re not allowed to use that against me.”

“I want you to think back to this time last week when I  _ told you  _ this was a horrible idea. Like, I used those  _ exact _ words, didn’t I? Horrible. Idea. Do you remember?” Joe goes on, pacing a dramatic line up and down in front of Patrick’s fireplace, where stockings aren’t hung with care or otherwise. There’s no Christmas tree, no garland, no shiny-eyed infant excited by house-breaking jolly old elves. It’s the saddest pre-holiday space. 

Patrick stares at Joe’s knees and nods, empty inside. 

“Great,” Joe says. “Happy holidays, you bastard.”

Andy fetches glasses of clear liquid that’s probably water but Patrick hopes dearly is tequila. The anaesthetising properties of grain alcohol would be welcome right about now. He takes a big gulp of ice water and hopes for drowning. 

“He didn’t mean to hurt anyone. Um…  _ did  _ you?” Andy asks. The look he gives Patrick is uncertain and Patrick’s going to analyse that later, use it as another stick to beat himself with but for now, he answers true. 

“Of course I didn’t  _ want  _ to hurt him.” Patrick’s voice comes out flat, like a heart rate monitor when everything’s over. 

Joe glares. “And yet...”

“I’m… preemptively hurting him. A little,” he blurts, and it sounds like bullshit even to his own ears. “It’s like… straightening a broken bone, so it sets properly. Yes, it hurts now, I  _ know  _ that. But, like, I need you to think about the epicsupermega hurt I’m saving him from!”

Andy and Joe offer him equally confused looks. “What do you mean?” Andy asks. 

Patrick pulls his sleeves down over his palms and pulls his hands into fists, the sensation of cashmere over skin soothing. He shrugs. He doesn’t want to say it out loud.

Joe sneers. “You’re so full of shit.” 

Andy blinks slowly. “You’re… scared,” he theorises. “You think you’re destined to mess this up. You think pulling back now will hurt less in the long run than taking a chance and fucking up six months, a year, ten years down the road. Like… ripping off a band aid. You’re  _ scared.  _ That’s it, isn’t it?”

Patrick takes a deep breath. He’s tried lying. He’s tried hiding. Maybe it’s time he tried facing the truth. It can’t possibly hurt more than he’s hurting himself. 

“Terrified,” Patrick says slowly. “More terrified than I’ve ever been in my life, about anything, actually. I sat in his kitchen and Brontë called me daddy and all I could see was me, letting them down. Breaking their hearts. Making them  _ sad.” _

“Oh, Patrick,” says Andy, and Patrick’s crying  _ again.  _ He  _ resents  _ this uncontrollable outpouring of emotion. He spent most of last night—the parts he remembers—sobbing into the crook of his elbow. Tears  _ must _ be finite, or, at least, if life is fair, they  _ should  _ be. Patrick’s cultivated a special place in his head, somewhere beyond the fragility of human emotion, a place he keeps Pete, and every romantic thought or notion he’s had about Pete since the day they met. The walls are collapsing faster than Patrick can prop them up. He stands, ankle-deep in emotional rubble with no idea how to rebuild. 

Patrick is terrible at loving anything. Always has been. A sticky cancer, a treacherous rot, he doesn’t love, he consumes until the good is gone and nothing’s left but rotten black pus. 

“I’m scared,” Patrick says, the truth. Another truth: “I’m afraid. I’ve felt this before, sort of. I’ve fallen in love and it’s great—until it’s not. Until I fall  _ out _ of love and move on and he—he deserves better than that. They both do.”

Joe and Andy share another of those confused looks. “Uh,” Joe says, “Like… what?” 

“I don’t know how to love him safely,” Patrick says. “I’ve tried being in a relationship and it always goes wrong. I can’t attach, I don’t know how, it’s like everyone else is a barnacle, hanging on to the fucking happiness hull and I don’t know  _ how,  _ so—”

Andy’s laughing. Patrick is pouring his heart out and Andy is  _ laughing.  _

He looks up, furious, and says, “None of this is fucking funny.”

“Dude,” Joe says, shaking his head. “Objectively, it’s fucking  _ hilarious.  _ You don’t know how to love  _ Pete?  _ Seriously? Like, what the fuck?”

“Patrick,” Andy says, patting his knee like Patrick is a confused elderly labrador, “you know how to love Pete. The problem is, you love Pete so much you don’t know how to love people who  _ aren’t Pete.” _

“Not true!”

“Totally true. Undeniably true. Backed up with evidence, I’m a scientist, don’t argue with me.”

Patrick is struck by the sudden sensory memory of Pete’s mouth under his as Pete pushed inside of him for the first time. He remembers the happy, laughing shape of it more than anything else about that moment. The way his eyes crinkled as he smiled. His face heats. He makes a tiny whine of distress. 

Joe tosses the same tissue-wrapped package Patrick found in the box in Pete’s basement onto the floor at Patrick’s feet. “You’re a moron. He asked me to give this to you.”

Patrick picks it up. It’s neither particularly heavy, nor notably light. He smooths the pad of his thumb along the edge, feels the dip, surmises that it’s some kind of book, or album. He looks at Joe. “Thanks.”

“Don’t thank me, just open it.”

Patrick does. 

Patrick peels back the tissue paper and finds a scrapbook. It’s nothing fancy, just the kind with spiral binding and thick, cardboard pages. Frowning, he opens the cover and looks through the pages, one by one, and gets the sense he might be going into shock. Halfway though, and verging on catatonic, he blinks heavily and goes back to the beginning and forces himself to pay attention because this—this is beyond rational comprehension.

Pete has made, and Patrick has to take a breath before he lets the thought take form like a stalactite, a Book of Them. Photographs of the two of them. Ticket stubs from shows and movies they saw together. Drinks receipts, birthday cards, a page edged with a ratty, handwoven friendship bracelet. Pete’s spiky, blocky handwriting weaves between mementos, snatches of conversations, lines that look a lot like lyrics or poetry, memories of nights Patrick remembers but only from his own perspective. There are pictures of Patrick and Pete, and Pete looks in love with him. Pictures of Patrick  _ taken _ by Pete, and the way they’re framed… Pete is  _ obviously  _ in love with him. Pictures of Patrick and Pete and Brontë, from newborn to baby to wide-eyed toddler. They look—

Like a family.

The final page is a picture Pete’s mom took at Navy Pier. Patrick has Brontë on his hip, ice cream dripping onto his shirt, and he’s looking into Pete’s eyes with a grin that could span continents. Pete is looking right back at him and smiling, his eyes unbearably fond, his hand on Patrick’s shoulder like that’s where it’s supposed to be. They look  _ so happy. _

“He loves me,” Patrick says softly. 

Andy punches his shoulder and says, “D’uh,” and Joe lets out a loud, sarcastic cheer. 

“I have to go,” he says, scrambling to his feet in search of pants and car keys. 

He wriggles into his jeans and grabs his coat, shoves his feet into the first pair of shoes he finds and aims for the door like a cavalry charge. 

And then he goes. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry it’s late!


	24. Chapter 24

Patrick drives back to Pete’s house like he’s returning to the scene of a terrible crime. His hands shake, his mouth sour with the threat of panic barf. Possibly, it’s starting to sink in that he ran away when Brontë called him daddy, like the idea of being her daddy was wrong, painful. Possibly, Pete isn’t feeling great about that. Possibly, Patrick has squashed Pete’s tender little strawberry heart and it can’t be fixed. He reaches over and touches the cover of the scrapbook on the passenger seat. It brings him comfort; a rosary, or lucky rabbit’s foot. A reminder that to love means loving someone even when they do the wrong thing.

Still, speeding through Wilmette with no assurances other than a scrapbook feels pretty fucking reckless. Fuck, though. It’s not like he has a choice. Or a plan. Or even a vague list of bullet points he can fall back on if Pete slams the door in his face. All he knows about romance he learned from eighties movies and, if John Hughes taught him anything, it’s that standing on Pete’s doorstep with his phone over his head, blasting Pete Gabriel like John Cusack, legally obligates Pete to forgive him.

“Everything is going to be fine,” Patrick reassures his steering wheel. His steering wheel doesn’t look like it cares either way, but he pats it, emphasizing his point.

He approaches Pete’s snowy driveway at speeds his BMW finds intolerable. Seeing Pete’s Ford trundling toward him, Patrick takes a big, panicky breath, bites his lip, and makes a big, stupid wheel-duking decision. His car arcs across the open mouth of Pete’s driveway. The Ford slews toward him, Pete’s eyes wild with panic. Patrick sees him mouth  _ what the fuck _ as his car slips and slides and loses traction. _ Great, _ Patrick thinks, screaming,  _ I’m going to fucking die before I tell him I love him. _

To review: there  _ is  _ something scarier than love and that’s accidental vehicular manslaughter. Patrick closes his eyes and his grip on the wheel and braces for the crunch. Everything is eerily still but Patrick’s heard that can happen in times of crisis. 

Pete’s voice comes though muffled, shrill with fury, not calming at all: “Are you out of your ffff… goddamn  _ mind! _ You nearly killed us!” 

_ Nearly  _ is good. Nearly implies Patrick’s not dead, after all. He opens his eyes to the snowy stillness of Pete’s front yard, not the afterlife. Pete’s fender is inches from Patrick’s door, steaming gently in the cold. Patrick can count the drops of melted snow dripping from the grille. “Oh,” Patrick says, wobbly, like the jello salad his grandma used to make. He winds down his window. “Oh, we’re not dead. That’s good!”

Pete is out of his car, stomping through the snow in his seasonally inappropriate Nikes and DePaul hoodie. “Yet,” he says darkly. “Do you have any idea how dangerous that was? We could’ve died, idiot.”

“I had to make you stop,” Patrick protests. “You were leaving and I panicked and I thought,  _ hey, aim for the front of his car, that way if he goes anywhere he’s got to take you as a hood ornament _ and, in the moment, it made a lot of sense. It… makes less sense now. I should not have done that.” 

“I would’ve stopped when I saw your car! I’m going to my parent’s house for Christmas, not aiming for the horizon with a trunk full of—Ugh! What the hell, Patrick.” Pete grabs a handful of his hair and tugs. Then: “Are you okay? You’re not… hurt, are you?” 

Patrick takes a deep breath. “Not physically, no,” he says, prone to drama. “Can we talk?”

“Why?” The tender, easy look Pete’s giving him calcifies into something sour, like he’s remembered he’s supposed to be mad at Patrick. His voice turns brassy and cold. “So you can make another grand declaration then run off before New Year’s? Honestly—I’d rather not, if it’s all the same to you.”

Patrick cringes. “I didn’t mean to—”

“Well, you did,” Pete says, his voice sharp as Japanese steel. “And you kind of broke my heart and I’m still—I’m so mad at you right now, I can’t stand to look at you. I’m not ready to be friends again and I’m not sure I ever will be. So. Whatever to that, I guess.”

“But you  _ scrapbooked _ for me.”

Pete blushes redder than homemade cranberry sauce. “Yeah. Then you took off.”

“That’s why I’m asking you to talk,” Patrick tries. Good thing he didn’t script this conversation  _ at all _ on the drive over, there’s no way he would’ve thought to add the part where he’s talking through his open car window. 

Pete wraps his arms around himself and shivers. “Why?”

“Because… we’re notoriously bad at talking,” Patrick reasons. “We’re really good at  _ not  _ talking about what’s been going on between us for the past ten years and we’ve gotten  _ really  _ good at acting on the physical stuff instead of talking about the feelings stuff. The feelings stuff is hard. But… I don’t think talking about it will make it worse. Might even make it better, if we try. What do you say?”

“That you’re an asshole,” Pete says. Patrick flinches, knowing he deserves it but not hurting any less for it. “How do you think this works, exactly? Do you expect us to go back to being friends after what we did? Do I get to spend another ten years watching you with every other guy who’ll give you the time of day while you—”

“That’s not fair! You could’ve told me how  _ you  _ felt. You just expected me to process my feelings and then process yours, too? Well f-u-c-k you, too. I’ve—”

“But I was the one with everything to lose!” Pete roars, and everything goes very still. Patrick stares at him, at the single father with his battered car and crumbling house and Pete says again, very quietly: “I was the one with everything to lose.”

Wait, what? 

“Wait… What?”

“You, idiot. You’re everything to Brontë and I.”

It’s possible that Patrick’s crying when he says, “I didn’t mean… You didn’t  _ lose  _ me. I’m right here.”

“Whatever. You ran off, Patrick. We spent the night together and I let that last wall down between us and you  _ ran away _ when she called you daddy. Do you have any idea how much that hurt?”

“Hi, daddy!” Brontë shouts from the back of the car, timing impeccable as always. Patrick can’t see her, just the pink pom-pom on top of her hat. “Sticky daddy, not other daddy.”

“Other daddy,” Pete repeats, mopping at his eyes with his cuffs and snorting like a truculent racehorse.

“Hi, sweetie,” Patrick shouts back. To Pete: “And I’m sorry, okay? I… panicked. But I panicked because I figured I’d fuck up, not because you did anything wrong. I’m  _ scared,  _ okay? I’m scared I won’t be the boyfriend you deserve, or the dad she needs. I’m so, so  _ sorry.  _ But I want to try, if you’ll still let me.”

Pete rubs his hands over his face and when he pulls away, he looks tired. “Is there any chance you could drive to my parents house without causing a forty vehicle pileup? I’d like someone to watch Brontë while we have the rest of this conversation.”

Patrick grins, a little of that icicle slippery victory staying tight in his grasp. “I can try.”

They reconvene in the elaborate treehouse in the Wentzes backyard. 

“This is very Kevin McAllister,” he tells Pete. Across the yard, the house glows with festive cheer and Patrick watches the shadows of Pete’s relatives moving behind the curtains. “I keep waiting for Joe Pesci to climb out of your bedroom window and zipline over the lawn.”

“It’s the only place guaranteed to have no great-aunts,” Pete says, shrugging one shoulder. 

“What does your mom think we’re doing?” Patrick asks. 

“Having a horrible conversation about our poorly thought out quickie marriage,” Pete snaps. 

Patrick cringes. “Oh.”

“Sorry,” Pete says, deflating, the word hissing out of him like air from a tyre. He hasn’t looked Patrick in the eye since they arrived. Patrick keeps reaching out for that psychic thread they share but Pete keeps spooling it in. Looks like he’s figuring this one out alone. Patrick bites his lip. In spite of two car journeys and a perilous rope swing climb between leaving his apartment and now, he still has no idea what to say. 

“I used to hide out here when I was a kid,” Pete says, his back to Patrick as he pulls the rope ladder up behind them. “I mean, I say  _ kid.  _ The last time was when Brontë was a newborn. Thanksgiving, Christmas, birthdays, you name it, I hid in the treehouse. It was so fucking loud down there, but up here? I could watch them from a distance. Families, right? They’re a lot.”

Although Pete has finished his sentence, Patrick gets the feeling there’s more to say. That maybe now, in the dark, Pete’s offering him a second chance. Patrick bites onto his lip and waits, his knees drawn up to his chest. Pete looks back at him over his shoulder, a tiny smile tugging the corner of his mouth. 

“I waited for them to come look for me,” Pete says, dropping down next to Patrick. “I’d ramp up the melancholy. How long can I wait? Will they notice I’m not there when they start eating? When they hand out gifts? Will they leave me out here all night? Bet they’ll find my body in the snow and then they’ll be sorry they didn’t come looking for me. For full and frank disclosure, you need to picture me doing this in JNCO jeans, blasting Earth Crisis.”

Patrick doesn’t mean to, but he laughs. He can imagine Pete hiding up here, young and skinny, full of piercings and introspection, a modern day Holden Caulfield. 

“Don’t fucking laugh at me,” Pete says, tipping his head back against the treehouse wall. He’s smiling though, big and shinier than the Wentz family Christmas tree. “I was full of teenage angst at the time. I read a lot of Hemingway. There was… a lot of misdirected machismo.”

Pete’s hand is creeping toward Patrick’s across the tiny shared space. Patrick lets his own hand follow that compelling gravity they share and meets him halfway. Their fingertips touch and Patrick feels it all the way through skin, tissue, muscle, and deep into his marrow. Patrick says, “And did they? Come look for you, I mean.”

Pete’s fingers close over Patrick’s with easy familiarity. He rolls his eyes so hard he risks dislocation. “Of course they fucking did, asshole. They’re my  _ family. _ That’s what families do.”

“I hate to ruin the comparison, but we’re not family,” blurts Patrick’s stupid mouth, without any input from his stupid brain. “Like, that’s the problem, isn’t it? You’re not genetically obliged to deal with me. We didn’t stop and have a conversation and then I fucked it up, and I’m so—”

“Patrick, stop,” Pete says, laughing. “God, just… stop. I know you’re sorry, okay? I know. I didn’t bring you here for the grand apology.”

Patrick tilts his head like a puppy.  _ Love is _ , he keeps thinking, _ love is, love is. _ Like the first line to a song he used to know, like the B-side that’s better than the release.  _ Love is knowing someone is there in the fog, even when you can’t see them.  _ “Okay…” he says slowly. “But—”

“We messed up,” Pete goes on, “but, like,  _ we’re going to mess up.  _ You do understand that, don’t you? Couples… argue. They have disagreements about big things and not so big things and sometimes you’ll want to shove me off a bridge and sometimes I’ll want to lock you in the basement and that’s… okay. We fought when we were friends. We’ll still fight when we’re together. It doesn’t mean either of us should doubt, for even a second, that we love each other.”

It clicks, then. Every cog lines up and clears the wide golden channel between heart and tongue and Patrick opens his mouth and blurts out, “Yes! Yes, I fucking  _ love _ you. I do. I love you so, so much. I love you, and I love Brontë, and I love being your fucking soulmate, most likely. Oh, and possible co-host in a televisual remodelling of your house—”

“Our house.” Pete corrects. His face twists. “Wait, we’re doing  _ what  _ with the house now?”

“Brendon wants us to remodel the house for, like, the channel. If that’s—is that something you’re into? Two incomes, a sabbatical from the firm, all that time at home with B…” Patrick had no idea how much he wanted Pete to say yes until he’s sitting, waiting for Pete to say yes. 

“Like… holy shit,” Pete says, eyes wide. “That’s… amazing? What the fuck?”

Patrick shuffles closer. “Listen. The important thing is, I love our life, and I’d love to make it official, I—Can we make it official?” 

Laughing, Pete pulls Patrick onto his lap and tips backwards until they’re sprawled across the floor in an octopus tangle of limbs and tongues. “I’m already yours, idiot” Pete says into Patrick’s mouth. “Always have been.”

Pete’s mom’s voice drifts across the snowy lawn. “Pete? Patrick? Dinner!” 

“Come inside,” Pete says, tugging Patrick onto his knees and meeting him there. “Come eat. Come to bed. Come for dinner and stay for Christmas and come and come and come and never fucking go.”

“That’s a  _ lot  _ of coming.”

“Yeah. I hope so.”

“Oh,” Patrick says, fumbling in his pocket. “I still have your grandpa’s wedding ring.”

Pete’s smile is brighter than every Christmas light in Marshall Field’s.  Patrick closes his eyes, and closes his hands in the folds of Pete’s sweater, and when he opens his mouth to express his disbelief, Pete kisses him into dizzying silence. Patrick cannot believe a single fucking second of his luck. The thing that’s changed is that  _ nothing _ has changed. Patrick feels the same way he felt about Pete ten minutes ago, last week, a decade ago. 

“Why don’t you hang on to it,” Pete says, nibbling Patrick’s neck. “I have a feeling we’re gonna need it.”

They scramble down the ladder and Bronte races across the lawn to meet them, kicking up snow and throwing herself into Patrick’s arms squealing, “Daddy and daddy, Grandma Dale maked  _ cookies!” _ and they carry her back into the house between them. Patrick has never loved two people as much as he loves the ones seated either side of him at the dinner table. 

“I am so happy,” Patrick tells Pete, as they help Bronte hang her stocking and lay out cookies and milk for Santa. And Bronte kisses his cheek, because she’s charming, and Pete licks the lens of his glasses, because he’s disgusting. 

“Of course you are,” Pete says reasonably. “The only person making you unhappy was you. All it took was a scrapbook to make you see.”

Patrick winks. “You should’ve scrapbooked me years ago.”

Pete leers. “Play your cards right and I’ll scrapbook you later tonight. Ever been scrapbooked on Star Wars sheets? I can scrapbook you all night long, baby. I have a lot of glue sticks, just try me.” 

Patrick is laughing too hard to speak, so he doesn’t say anything else, just presses his face into Pete’s throat and smells his Petesy smell and is completely, blissfully at home. 

It turns out, Patrick has always loved Pete. It turns out, love is like a snowglobe; glittering, overwhelming, and standing at the centre makes it hard to see out. 

With Bronte and Pete, it’s shaping up to be the best Christmas ever.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I’m so sorry I haven’t replied to your lovely comments yet guys, I swear I will! 
> 
> So... I said I’d need 25 chapters but, actually, I’m pretty happy with how this rounded out. I can’t thank you enough to reading and commenting and in these increasingly fraught times, reading your comments and talking to you guys has been like a light in a particularly stormy night. Thank you, from the very bottom of my heart. 
> 
> I hope, sincerely, that we’re not in this mess this time next year. I hope that 2021 has good times ahead for all of us. But right now, wherever you are in the world, whoever you’re with, however you’re spending the holidays, I hope you have a peaceful, restful few days. This fandom is such a wonderful place. I can’t imagine the past few months without you guys. So... take care, okay? And happy holidays.


End file.
